And Sometimes I Wonder About You (24 page)

I
spent that night at the Hotel Brown. Looking back on it, I might have spent the time at home but whatever there had been between Katrina and me was over in the marriage department; and, anyway, with a woman like Marella there had to be some time to say good-bye.

When I awoke the next morning she was already awake and dressed and packed. Her black-and-pink-polka-dotted bag was at the door. I sat up and found a cup and an aluminum thermos-pitcher on the nightstand next to my side of the bed.

“I’ll go downstairs and check out while you get dressed,” she said. “Meet you at the front desk.”

Her tone was curt and she wasn’t smiling at all. The fact that she didn’t kiss me was more an expression of love than any sex could have ever been. Marella was facing the unfamiliar task of weaning herself off of emotional dependence upon another human being. I knew this to be true but it hurt me anyway. There aren’t many times in life that you meet another person cast in the same kiln, formed by the same dispassionate hand.

I drank my coffee before putting on my pants; browsed the headlines on my smartphone while tasting the bitter dregs that I needed to stay sharp and focused.

Aldo Ferinni, Max White, and Josh Farth—all from Boston—had been shot dead on the fifteenth floor of the Tesla Building by a squad of New York policemen. The three men had been identified by a private detective, me, to the NYPD as persons of interest in two murders. Two officers were wounded in the firefight. No bystanders were harmed.

Twill was sitting at the nearest round table in the first-class waiting room for the Acela to Boston. He wore a very nice dark gray suit with a bright white shirt and a razor-thin blue, green, and yellow tie. His shoes were matte black and tied with perfect bows.

When we approached him the smile that had been missing returned to Marella’s lips.

“You must be the Twill that gives him such sleepless nights,” she said, holding out a hand.

“And you’re Marella,” he said, surprising her with a kiss, “that kept him company through that hard time.”

The three of us would have been perfect together for as long as the gravy train ran.

“Son,” I said, using the word as an anchor as well as a greeting.

“Pops.”

We had stopped playing chess after Twill turned thirteen. From then on Go was our game. Twill set out a tablet device between us on the table in the block of four seats, two facing two. He hit an app that brought up a Go grid and we began to play.

After half an hour or so Marella asked, “What’s the purpose of this game?”

She had deigned to sit next to me with her hand lightly on my thigh. Having seen me at my best, or worst, she knew that I had a romantic bent and remained close to keep me going in a straight line.

“It’s a game of war,” Twill said, studying his next move. “The purpose is to defeat the enemy by surrounding him while maintaining your army if you can.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Marella decreed. “In a war it all happens at once, not one move at a time.”

“That depends,” my old-soul son replied.

“On what?”

“On if you think a mathematician learns how to add before he takes on calculus.”

Twill was never very good in math class but that didn’t mean that he lacked understanding.

At South Station in Boston my forces were beleaguered but Twill was hurting also. I had a couple of stones on him but that didn’t matter; it was the kind of war that the United States liked to make happen between its enemies. That was a lesson too.

Twill went off for a moment to call his clients while Marella and I had a talk.

“I do believe that that son of yours would have been just as effective as you if he was on that train from Philly,” she said.

“He’s something else,” I said with pride.

“You know I’m trying my best to forget you, Lee.”

“There’s plenty of time for that,” I said. “A whole life.”

“You’re never going to come with me, are you?”

Instead of answering I took her by both hands.

“It’s like we were almost real for a few days there,” I said. “I don’t think that anybody could ask for more than that.”

We, all three of us, checked into a suite that Zephyra had booked for us at the Hotel Bombay.

After I’d shown my ID and credit card I asked the desk clerk, “Shouldn’t you be calling this the Hotel Mumbai?”

The red-brown Indian woman,
PASHA
her nametag read, smiled and nodded. She was in her forties and a beauty on any continent.

“
You
have to call it that,” Pasha told me. “But my husband, who owns this hotel, is from Bombay, not Mumbai. Maybe our children will change the name.”

“Do you have a conference room available tomorrow afternoon?” I asked.

“What time?”

“We don’t know for sure but we’ll definitely need it. Can I take from noon to six?”

“I’ll have to check and get back to you later.”

After we’d lugged Marella’s hundred-pound suitcase to the rooms I kissed her on the lips.

“We have to go out and do what needs doing,” I told her.

She smiled and said, “You’ll know I believe you if I’m still here when you get back.”

Twill and I walked to Cambridge. It was little more than a mile.

“She somethin’ else, Pop,” he said as we were crossing the footbridge that led over to Harvard Square. “I mean that’s a woman you could write about in the history books.”

“You know what we’re doing here, right?” I said, avoiding his invitation to the truth.

“Sure do. If what your girl Celia says is right it should be a breeze.”

Melbourne Westmount Ericson was waiting for us near the entrance of the Enclave building. He’d come alone, as I’d asked him to, wearing khaki cargo pants and a pink short-sleeve Polo pullover shirt.

We shook hands and I introduced him to my son.

“You look like a good personal assistant,” Melbourne said to Twill.

“That’s the job.”

“Did you call them?” I asked the billionaire.

“Said that I was considering an endowment,” he said. “After reading about them online I might really do it. It’s really a very interesting enterprise. Combining historical and literary provenance with the weight of ownership, there could be all kinds of interesting study. But there’s one thing.”

“And what thing is that?”

“I’m uncomfortable stealing from these people.”

I might have hated my father. I might have come to the realization that ants and termites were more socialist than Lenin or Marx could ever be when I hadn’t yet reached the age of twenty. But no matter how I feel about blood and
philosophy—when
I hear a truly wealthy man tell me that he’s uncomfortable with theft I have the desire to wring his neck.

Suppressing my natural response, I said, “Only the book was bequeathed to this institution, and that was a mistake, it doesn’t even show up on the list of gifts. The papers inside are of a personal nature. Imagine if those pictures of Marella got into the hands of some newspaper in DC or New York. Wouldn’t you want me to retrieve them by any means necessary?”

“It’s that bad?” he asked.

“Worse by a factor of forty-nine.”

“Let’s get going,” he said to my son.

I sat down at a bus stop across the street, unsure of what to do with my strangling hands.

Maybe the rage I felt had some kind of outward expression, making me look like a threat while sitting on a wooden bench on an autumn day.

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said six or seven minutes after I sat.

I looked up and saw a young white cop. He had a pale complexion and a partner that looked nothing like him and yet also would have claimed to be a white man. Something about the disjuncture of their appearance and supposed race reminded me of the rich man who claimed to disdain theft.

“Yes, Officer?”

“What are you doing?”

“Sitting.”

“There’s only one bus that stops here and it just went by,” the second cop said.

“I said I was sitting, not waiting for the bus.”

“This is a bus stop,” the second cop said.

“Is there some kind of law in Massachusetts saying that a tired man can’t sit down at a bus stop without taking a ride?”

“Stand up, sir,” the second policeman ordered.

If I wanted to stay on the case I should have popped up like a tulip in the spring. But there was too much weighing on me: Marella and her man, Jones and those kids, Hiram Stent and his inability to make the right decision.

I looked up at a tree in front of the Enclave across the street. There was a red bird of some kind flitting around the branches, enjoying the experience of dexterity and flight, singing his heart out. For a moment, maybe two, I forgot those cops existed.

Then I felt the hand under my right arm. He, the first cop, tried to lift me. I tensed my muscles and his fingers were trapped. He must have looked frightened because his partner pulled out his gun and said, “Down on your knees!”

I might have died then and there. And those policemen were in as much danger as they feared—maybe more.

But I lowered to my knees while putting unclenched hands in plain sight. That didn’t assure my survival but it was the best choice I had.

Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that’s okay because there’s always somebody around that’s happy to remind you.

T
he policemen actually arrested me; took me to the station, snapped me face-forward and profile, took fingerprints, then interrogated me about various crimes that had happened with a black face maybe somewhere involved.

The whole show didn’t take long. When it was done they allowed me a phone call.

“Mr. McGill?” she said.

“Hey, Z. You back from the motherland?”

“Are you in Boston?”

“Cambridge jail.”

Sitting on a cot in a cell built for one, behind slatted iron bars, I felt unusually calm. I
was
the honey badger and Marella was the honey; Ericson, Jones, and Dame Gray were the common death threats along the way. And there I was, in the Cambridge jail, imprisoned for nothing I’d done wrong.

It could have been worse and there was still a chance that it might get that way.

These thoughts occurred to me in snatches because I was counting breaths and breathing ever so lightly.

At some point later a man in a black uniform came to pull me out of my meditation cell. He told me that I was being released.

“On bail?” I asked.

“No,” the barrel-shaped pink-skinned man said. “Just released.”

He led me to a room much like the one I’d been questioned in, but instead of inquisitors Melbourne Westmount Ericson and Twill were waiting for me. Along with them was a short chocolate-colored man in a ridiculous powder-blue suit that fit him like a medium glove on an extra-large hand.

“Harlan Sackman,” the new man said, holding out a hand. He had barely an inch on me.

I suppose he had a strong grip.

“I’ll be representing Mr. Ericson while he’s in Mass.,” the lawyer said. “The police have come to understand that their men were overzealous.”

“Overzealous? They arrested me for sitting on a street corner bench.”

“Actually,” Sackman said, “they arrested you for refusing a direct order.”

Sackman rankled me. I didn’t like his clothes or his profession, but what bothered me most was that he endorsed the behavior of the police. I never liked it when a person so identified with their oppressor that they forgave them.

“Come on, Pops,” Twill said, seeing my reaction. “Mr. Ericson and me did what you wanted.”

“Everything?” I asked my son while still staring at the powder-blue suit.

“Oh yeah.”

There was a stretch limo waiting outside the stationhouse. The four of us climbed inside and I gave the driver the name of our hotel.

We didn’t speak on the short ride.

When we got there I separated from the herd and asked the front desk if they had managed to get us the conference room. They had.

That’s when I got nervous.

There were all kinds of things that could have gone wrong. Maybe Ericson really wanted revenge and had his driver call ahead to whatever assassins he might have employed. Maybe Marella had run off as she’d said she might.

“To the room?” Twill asked me.

Ericson and the apologist Sackman were standing ten feet off discussing something.

“You got it?” I asked Twill.

“Of course.”

“Let me see.”

From inside his jacket he pulled out a packet of folded paper, about seven or eight sheets deep. I took the trove from him and pocketed it.

“Any trouble?”

“No,” Twill replied. “No airport machine, no body search. You were right when you said they’d never do a security scan on their own kind. When him and the head man sat down I asked if I could walk around the rooms. I went right to the shelf that Celia told us about. The history book was in the Swedish Bible. The letter was in a hole dug out in between the pages.”

Twill said no more because Melbourne and his lawyer approached us.

“Ninth floor,” I told them before they could ask.

Marella stood up from the conference table when we entered the room. She wore a tight white dress, its hem somewhere above the knee. Her dark skin against the formfitting fabric sent a chill through me.

She hadn’t been reading or writing when we arrived; just sitting there patiently like I had in my jail cell. It struck me that we’d not discussed literature. Maybe she was like most Americans, rarely if ever reading a book. That didn’t bother me at all. We weren’t all going to be readers. I could study Proust while she shopped for tight white dresses—the division of labor.

“Mar,” Melbourne Ericson said, all breathless.

“Sit down, Mel,” she said. “And who are you?”

“Harlan Sackman. I’m Mr. Ericson’s lawyer. I’m here to—”

“Wait outside,” she said as if maybe she was completing his sentence. “Mel and I need to talk one-on-one if we’re going to work anything out.”

I noted that her little black holster-purse was on the table. That might have bothered me if it wasn’t for the sexy white dress; that was the statement of intent for the billionaire.

“That’s okay, Harlan,” Melbourne said. “We’ll speak alone and then, if we need your help, we’ll bring you in.”

“Are you sure?” the lawyer asked his meal ticket.

“Yes.”

“Are
you
sure?” I asked Marella.

“You’re cute” was her answer.

Outside the conference room stood five stuffed chairs, placed there for less important players in the larger corporate games. Harlan and Twill were on their phones immediately reading texts, listening to messages, and making calls. I was anachronistic, taking out the handwritten letter penned by Charles Gray on both sides of each sheet. The lines in the lettering were so fine I decided that he must have been using a crow-quill nib.

The content was horrifying. There had been rapes and murders, mutilations and long-term starvations, tampering with genitals, eyes, and fingers; death served in a broad variety of ways and recounted in a dispassionate tone that made the content all the worse.

The only time that Charles showed any emotion in his writing was when he wrote about his mother (who he assumed would already be dead). He blamed her for the homicides, for creating a monster.

…
it was my mother, who, by withholding her love made me into a thing that has no relation to right and wrong…

I read the letter through twice, making my plans. I was almost through the third pass when the conference room door opened and Melbourne and Marella came out. The last words of Charles’s confession were in my mind.
I go now to my death having completed a life’s work in less than two decades.

“Congratulate me,” Melbourne Westmount Ericson said to Harlan Sackman.

While they were shaking hands and smiling, Marella came up to me.

“Say the word and we can leave right now,” she said, telling me many things.

I wanted to go. I wanted to leave everything behind me and, like my father, disappear into history.

“If you ever have a problem I’ll be there” was my reply.

Sackman approached us then with his felicitations for the bride-to-be…once more.

Melbourne reached out a hand to me and I grabbed it, pulling him close.

“If anything happens to her I will kill you,” I whispered. “Don’t make any mistake about that. So if it’s love I wish you well. Otherwise…”

“You don’t have to worry, Mr. McGill,” he said, managing a calm voice despite the pain in his hand. “I love her more than anything.”

What could I say? Marella wasn’t in jeopardy, Melbourne was.