And Sometimes I Wonder About You (22 page)

T
he sign read
LANNY’S EATS
but everyone who went there called it Smokers. It was the last place in Manhattan, that I knew of, that encouraged its customers to smoke while warning away those who somehow felt that there was a loophole in the Death Clause that came with each and every human body. The front door, on far west Christopher Street, opened onto a long corridor that was usually filled with tobacco smoke; this because the vent fans from the dining room blew through there. At the end of the hall was a sign that actually read
GIVE UP ALL HOPE YE THAT ENTER HERE
.

I had not asked Bug why he liked to go to Smokers. He had never smoked and, before he turned Mr. Universe, he never even went out. I figured it was a reaction to how much his life had changed since he’d met Zephyra. He didn’t want to believe that he’d given up a life of pessimism for love.

Given my druthers I wouldn’t have ever gone there. I don’t smoke but I love smoking. Sucking on a cigarette and letting the smoke waft up from my mouth into my nostrils made me feel invincible. But boxers in training could not put that kind of strain on their breath. I had been on the treadmill my whole life and so smoking would have to wait until I died.

After spending half an hour at Smokers I had fevered dreams filled with coffins and Lucky Strikes for days.

The floors and ceiling were painted white and the walls tar-black. Lanny Marks was the server and his brother (also named Lanny) worked the kitchen; that way no employee could sue them for health issues later on.

“Can you imagine somebody suing you over gettin’ sick?” Lanny the cook asked me one off-night when Bug and I were the only customers. “Everybody dies is sick first. You could kill somebody by kissin’
’
em or steppin’ on a toe and givin’
’
em a blood clot. I swear one day they gonna have a fine for BO.”

Bug was at a white table in a black corner eating pastrami and drinking a milk shake. He was hunkered down over the meal, looking like the runt of the litter that had grown into a timber wolf.

“Bug.”

He gazed up at me, unconsciously raising a hand to protect the meal.

“LT,” he said. “You didn’t say if you heard from Z.”

Young men and their virgin hearts. Bug had only fraternized with escort service girls before Zephyra, so now all he could think about was her and how he was bound to lose.

“She left a voice mail,” I lied, “saying she was on vacation.”

“Bitch.”

“What you got for me, B?” I said.

I pulled out a whitewashed chair and sat.

“What can I get you?” Lanny the waiter asked.

He was a ruddy-white and my height, so I liked him.

“You got that chicken rice soup today?”

“Every day.”

I nodded and he went off.

In the meanwhile Bug pushed away his sandwich, pulled a square and flat panel from a large leather bag at his side, and placed it at the center of the table. The white glass tile was maybe three times the size of an iPad. Bug touched a corner that didn’t look any different than anyplace else on the glassy rectangle. A bright light rose up from the surface, constructing what I can only call a pyramid of light above it. Rather than blocks of stone, this form was made from multicolored letters, words, images, and lines connecting them in horizontal, slanted, and vertical paths.

The topmost word was “Jones.”

There were eight other tables in the smoke-filled restaurant; three of these had two or more nicotine-addicted customers.

I looked around but Bug said, “Don’t worry, LT, in order to see this you got to be within three feet and you have to look at it straight on.”

To test this claim I stood up. The words and images blurred into pleasant pastel colors before my eyes. I took three steps away and the colors muted even more.

“In ten years every house in the civilized world will have 3-D TVs like this in the living room,” Bug said when I was seated again. “I hear there’s a sheik in Qatar and an Internet mogul in China got whole ballrooms made from panels like these. Not only will you be able to watch the movie, you’ll be able to get inside it.”

“Pretty great scientific tool,” I said aloud. “You could actually postulate a molecule and then get inside it to see what you thought wrong.”

“Wow,” Bug said. To him I had been a brute until that moment.

“Nice lights,” Lanny the waiter said as he put the soup down in front of me. “But don’t turn up the volume.”

“Tell me what we got here,” I said to Bug when Lanny was gone again.

Bug smiled and I knew I was in for a frightful treat.

“Fourteen hundred and sixty-two names active,” he said. “Those are the names in red. There are other names but they’re coded either inactive, blue, or closed, black.”

“What about all these shades of green?” I asked, not needing any explanation on “closed” files.

“Those are what the system calls tasks,” Bug said. “A task could be a robbery or the end of the line of a smuggling run. The shade of green is judged by the time that the task is expected to happen. The darkest ones are in the next twelve hours; the lighter to lightest are sometime later than that. I don’t show anything happening more than a week from the system clock.”

“Damn,” I said. “There must be three hundred tasks listed.”

I wanted a cigarette.

“Two sixty-seven,” Bug said. He took a sip from his milk shake straw.

“And these lines connecting green tasks to red names are telling us who is expected to be involved?”

“The solid ones,” Bug averred, “and the lines made up from dashes are probable participants.”

“Is the when and where in here?” I asked.

“Mostly. It’s a beautiful system but it’s like he was never afraid of being hacked. There’s no firewalls whatsoever.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Jones figures either he can blackmail or kill anybody try and use this against him.”

“He’s got the army for it,” Bug agreed. “He must have sent one of his kids to MIT or something. This work is beautiful.”

“Here’s your pie,” Lanny said.

I hadn’t heard him come up. He was holding a pink cardboard pie carton by its string handle. Bug took the box and said, “Can you put the whole thing on my bill, Lan?”

“Sure, David. No problem.”

“What kinda pie?” I asked when we were alone again.

“Um…It’s nothing, man. Lemon meringue. I put it in the fridge and take a slice now and then. That’s all.”

His words were an entire history of compensation and loss—the bookkeeping ledger of a young black man’s soul.

“How much information you have on the red names?” I asked to cover the epiphany.

“Almost everything. Addresses, cell phone numbers, even birthdays. There’s also a history list of the ‘tasks’ they were involved in.”

“Take the data from this pyramid and print it out like a report. Have it delivered to my office.”

I put my black hands on the white table, ready to rise and run.

“What about my question, LT?”

I sat back and gazed at the butterball who had exercised himself into the form of a demigod. He was still a child in my eyes. It struck me that Twill had never been that innocent.

“Why you got explosives knitted into every wall in your house, Tiny?”

“For protection.”

“That’s right. You know that you got a house full’a treasure. There are things you know that nobody else does. That’s valuable and dangerous.”

“So?”

“Now think about Zephyra. She can go out with sheiks and kings, princes and billionaires, but she took you.”

“And she still goes out with them.”

“And so you hit the detonator and blow it all to shit. Live with it, brother, or find a new way.”

B
ug and I separated at Hudson and Charles, where he turned to visit the old building that he maintained for storage. I suspected that he was going there to gorge on the pie.

I continued up Hudson double-thumbing my phone as I went.

“Is anything wrong, Mr. McGill?” she asked on the sixth ring.

“How’s the southern hemisphere?” I asked.

“We’re on a deserted beach,” Zephyra said, a little breathless. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Have you ever been here?”

“South Africa, yeah,” I said. “But what I saw was not beautiful.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“I think it’s time for you to come home, Z.”

“But I just got here.”

“I know. But you leaving hit Bug so hard I don’t think he’ll make through all those nights. Know what I mean?”

“I can’t put my life on hold for some guy who never learned how to take one step at a time,” she said coolly. “I like David but I don’t owe him anything.”

“That’s a fact,” I agreed. “But there’s another one.”

“What’s that?”

“If David fell back in on himself and I didn’t tell you about it first, I might lose the best Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant I ever had.”

She took a beat to digest my words and then asked, “Do you need anything else?”

“If you have the time.”

“He’ll fly me back on the private jet,” she said. “I can do everything over the Internet on the eight-hour flight.”

“It’s more like eleven, isn’t it?”

“Not if you fly in an SST.”

I called the Hotel Brown, got connected to Marella’s room, and had her order champagne, oysters, and caviar—all on ice.

“Are we celebrating?” she asked.

“It’s more like a going-away party.”

“Are we going somewhere?”

“Just me,” I said. “Just for the day tomorrow.”

“That hardly rates a party.”

“There’s a celebration in my heart every time I see you, girl.”

“You’re not going to start talking about love, are you?”

“What’s love got to do with it?”

Katrina sounded truly sad that I wasn’t coming home.

“Sorry, honey,” I said, making a rare apology for an absence. “But I have to go down to Philly to tie up some loose ends. You and Clarence can go out to dinner or something.”

“Bill went home this morning. He told me that he wanted you to call.”

“You got his number?”

“Hold on.”

“No, Katrina. Just text it to me. I’ll call him when I can.”

“I have a lot to talk to you about, Leonid.”

“I’ll be back in a day or so.”

Marella and I nibbled and sipped the icy treats and then we had sex like two lifers allowed their first conjugal visit in years.

I left her asleep in the bedroom of her suite at 5:30 the next morning, but before I was out the door she called to me, “Lee?”

She was standing three steps behind me, naked.

“What?” I asked.

“Where are you going?”

“Down to Philly.”

“Eddie and Camille again?”

I was surprised that she remembered my little story on the train. Then I remembered that she was a con artist; that meant she had to remember everything, both truth and lie.

“Yeah, it seems like Eddie had some unfinished business with a guy selling protection in the mall. I’m going down there to take an elevator ride with him.”

“Be careful,” she said sweetly, standing there naked, knowing that she was gravity—a force that a fool like me could never break.

The Acela first-class waiting room offered mediocre coffee, loud businessmen and -women who felt that they had to shout to be heard on cell phone calls, and a large space with a big TV that was almost always dialed in to the news. Luckily there was a smaller area with two round tables separated from the television and its loyal acolytes.

Johnny Nightly was sitting at the table closest to the entrance, reading a newspaper and looking like a
GQ
ad.

I checked in with the concierge and went over to Johnny (whom I had called the night before between bouts with the lovely if loveless Marella).

“LT.”

“Johnny.”

“The ticket Zephyra sent me says DC.”

“Mine too.”

“What we got on the itinerary?”

I explained as well as I could. When I finished Johnny simply nodded. Not long after that the train was announced and we, Johnny and I, boarded the first-class car for the three-hour ride down south.

We sat in single seats that faced each other over a table that was little more than a tray.

Johnny brought out a magnetic chess set with red and white plastic pieces that he’d owned since he was a boy of six. Back then, maybe forty years ago, Mrs. Nightly would bring the boy once a week to visit his father at Sing Sing. She would sit off to the side as Ring, the boy’s father, taught Johnny the nuances of chess.

Time allowing, Johnny still visits on Thursdays to play his old man.

He gave me a choice of hands. I got white and we applied our wills against each other for nearly the full ride. In two and a half hours we made twenty-five moves.

My iPad told me that Zephyra had traced credit card charges attributed to Melbourne Westmount Ericson to the bar at the Crown Hotel almost every weekday going back a year or more. She’d also sent a few photographs of the man in question. He was short for a man but tall for me, flesh-colored like the old-time Crayola crayon, and had a build that workingmen around the world maintain to keep their jobs if not their dignity. Even his tailor-made suit couldn’t hide the bulge of his belly.

Outside the hotel I asked Johnny if he had his gun.

“Two,” the good son replied.

I was also armed. As a rule I didn’t carry firearms across state borders but sometimes you find that you just have to cross that line.

We decided that Johnny should go into the bar first and set himself up at a point advantageous for interference if things went sideways. I introduced myself to the clerk at the front desk of the posh hotel and asked for group rates if my organization, the Benevolent Association of Landscape Artists of Color, decided to have our annual convention there. I had a business card that identified me as the secretary of that organization. There was also a website and an answering service to cover me.

The manager of the hotel, Michelle Tillman, came out and showed me a folder with all the benefits and special rates that the Crown Group offered. We talked for about ten minutes or so.

“Can you show me the bar, Ms. Tillman?” I asked. “You know, I find that our members, and those that often employ their talents, like to meet while, um, lubricated.”

Tillman was a café au lait–colored woman who had the pleasing figure that unmarried professional workingwomen had to maintain. She smiled knowingly and led the way.

When we approached the entrance to the bar my heart rate increased. I might have been going into a life-and-death situation and so my body wanted to give me all the help that it could.

Crown Bar was a perfectly round room maybe a hundred feet in diameter. The central floor was a yard lower than the arc bar that occupied the northern quadrant of the circle. There were three bartenders. The barstools were fewer than half filled because most of the customers were sitting at the thirty small round tables three feet below.

Johnny sat at a table near the bar.

I looked up and saw our quarry seated on one of the barstools. In front of him was a newspaper, a deli sandwich of some type, and a frosty glass mug of beer.

“As you can see,” Michelle Tillman was saying, “this room can hold more than a hundred people. At night we have live music, usually jazz. But it’s never so loud that it interferes with conversation.”

I looked around and nodded, noting at least two men who might have been bodyguards. One wore a tan suit that accented his broad shoulders and the other had a burgundy jacket and black slacks. Both men were sitting alone down in the people pit. Even if they were security they didn’t have to be working for Ericson. This was Washington, DC. There might have been half a dozen people in that room who needed protection.

“Do you mind if I sit at the bar?” I said. “To go over the information you gave me?”

“Of course,” she said forcefully.

She gestured with her left hand and after a moment of looking I took the vacant barstool next to my target. Michelle went to one of the bartenders, pointed at me, and told him to lubricate me—no doubt. She waved good-bye and I waved back.

I had made it to Melbourne Westmount Ericson’s side with an invitation from the establishment he frequented. Any security would have noticed and downgraded my presence from potential threat to unlikely danger.

“What can I get you, Mr. Brownley?” the head mixologist asked, using the name on my fake business card.

“Cognac,” I said. “XO.”

“On the rocks?”

“Straight up.”

“Yes sir.”

When the rosy-cheeked bartender went off to pour my drink I looked around, appraising a room that I’d probably never be in again.

“Ms. Tillman says that you represent a union of painters,” the barkeep asked when he returned with my snifter.

“More like a brotherhood,” I said. “Specialists like landscape artists can help each other out in dozens of ways.”

“My dad’s a painter,” the young man said.

“What kind?”

“I don’t know what you call it. Big canvases with a lot of circles and triangles. Real colorful.”

“Abstract.”

“Yeah, I guess, but if you said that to him he’d just get mad. He gets mad a lot.”

Just then the bartender noticed something or someone down the way.

“Excuse me,” he said. I couldn’t have scripted better dialogue or timing.

“You like this place?” I asked Melbourne Westmount Ericson.

“What?” he asked, turning to me.

He had the kind of face that in some ways defied description. The features themselves were young, possibly placing him somewhere in his thirties, a man who hadn’t experienced much and knew little, if any, hardship. But his hair was thinning and the puffy flesh around those features sagged like that of a man nearing retirement if not death.

“My brotherhood is thinking of having our next convention here,” I said.

“I heard you and Ralph,” Melbourne said. “Some kind of artists’ union?”

“No.”

“Oh,” he said, “I thought—”

I held up a finger, arresting my target with a silent command.

“I’m the piece opposite Alexander Lett in the chess game you’re playing,” I told him. “Lett’s got you, so Marella has procured my services with the proceeds from the sale of her engagement ring.”

A look of wonder spread across Ericson’s confusing face.

It was then I noticed that Johnny had come up to the bar. His signal to Ralph the bartender was actually telling me that there was danger afoot. Looking up into the curved mirror, I saw the man in the tan suit coming up behind me.

I was ready for the tussle, but before Tan Man could put a hand on my shoulder Melbourne gestured and said, “That’s okay, Philip.”

Tan Man stopped and leaned against the bar behind me. Johnny Nightly took the same position behind the billionaire.

“What’s your name?” the young/old man asked.

I told him the truth.

“Aren’t you the one who took her from the train?”

I told the story from my point of view.

“But,” Melbourne stammered, “but he was there only to deliver a message.”

“There was no message.”

“He was supposed to get her alone,” Melbourne said. “I know how much she treasures her privacy. He told me that she kept avoiding him and then you, you interfered.”

“Huh,” I grunted, pondering his words. “That may have been right. But it doesn’t say why he came up on me with a gun at my offices.”

“You broke his wrist and put him in the hospital. Alex is a proud man. Pride sometimes makes a man stupid. I should know.”

“You didn’t send him to retrieve the ring you gave Ms. Herzog?”

“Certainly not,” he said with real conviction. “I understand why she took the ring. She needed money. I had lost my temper and broke it off with her. She had every right, every right…”

“You can see where she has a whole different interpretation about your intentions,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, of course. She’s a woman alone in the world. She must protect herself.”

Anybody who tells you that they’re a good judge of character is telling you the truth but still they’re wrong. The best liars are impossible to read. They not only give
misinformation,
they become the lie. I thought I knew what I was looking at, but Melbourne could have been better than I was. There’s always somebody better. Mardi had deeper perceptions than I ever did. For all I knew, Jones’s man Fortune was a genius of misdirection.

I believed Melbourne but, at the same time, I knew I could be wrong.

“Are you in contact with Mar?” Melbourne asked.

“She calls me at certain times to see how I’m proceeding,” I admitted.

“She pays you?”

“Yes.”

“What if I were to pay you?”

“That would most probably be a conflict of interest.”

“But I told you,” he said, oh so honestly, “I don’t want the ring.”

“So? George Bush told me he was the education president.”

“I need to speak with her.”

“That’s up to her,” I said. “My job is to make sure that no more men with guns come trying to get to her.”

“After getting the firearms charges dropped I called Mr. Lett back home.”

“Excuse me if that doesn’t mean much.”

“Can you ask her if she’ll meet with me?”

“I could ask but I’d have to give her a good reason.”

“I want to give her another engagement ring,” he said. “I want to apologize for losing my temper and saying the things I did.”

If he was a liar he was good; if he wasn’t he was a fool.

“Mr. McGill?” he said after maybe a minute of silence on my part.

“Yes?”

“Will you give her the message?”

I hesitated.

“I’ll pay anything,” he added.