And Sometimes I Wonder About You (3 page)

M
arella Herzog’s cab pulled away leaving me a little stunned. My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight. It was this unusually calm and yet powerful beat that allowed me to go back into Penn Station. I guess I felt somewhat invulnerable and unconcerned with consequences or danger.

The main hall of the transportation hub was a little more frenetic than usual; like an ant colony that had just perceived some kind of physical threat. I counted nine police uniforms and actually saw the wheeled gurney that carried our unconscious attacker toward the front exit.

I was taking a greater chance than most civilians because half the NYPD had at least passing familiarity with my face. In my younger days I had been the danger. I was a private investigator who only worked for underworld figures setting up other crooks for their crimes. I had relinquished my evil ways but the police never forget and rarely forgive, so cops who weren’t even out of high school when I was active knew my mug shot.

I wasn’t worried because the police would have assumed that our attacker’s attacker had fled. Also I wasn’t going to be in the area of their ad hoc investigation for more than thirty seconds.

At the bottom of the escalator I took a hard left past the public toilets, through a short hall that housed a newsstand and a doughnut shop, and then down a concrete stairway into the long hall that led to the station’s commuter trains.

The lower-level arcade was a triple-wide passage with dozens of shops selling everything from orange pop to used books. If you were on your way out of the city, headed for some suburban home, you could get whatever you needed on that unnamed, underground, two-block-long street.

Strolling among the crowd, I considered the fight I’d just had along with the concept of organized sport. One day elevator fighting might become a recognized competition. The walls, floor, and ceiling would be made from transparent, steel-hard plastic and its audience mostly young and dissatisfied. The gladiators might enter the car on the first floor and travel upward, stopping at each stage to take on another challenger. The height of the ride would be the classification of the fighter, and anyone who made it to the top would be champion.

Why not?

Halfway down the arcade was an upscale coffee shop named Cheep’s. There was no logo for the espresso joint so I never knew if the name came from the false promise of lower prices or the cry of a small bird. At any rate, Cheep’s had two young black women and an older black man taking orders and serving overpriced coffee in paper cups. There were four small tables in the recess, three of which were most often untenanted because commuters were defined by forward motion, not sitting and sipping in a man-made hole.

One small round table had a regular occupant, however—a man known to most as the Professor. An older and diminutive white man, the Professor always wears a loose-fitting, threadbare suit, the color of dust. His cotton T-shirt is invariably navy and his back forever against the wall. The Professor is one of the many sources I go to to find out what’s happening in my town.

I got on line for coffee, watching the passageway peripherally. A few cops walked down looking for someone to raise his hand and say, “I did it. I beat up the guy holding the knife and then came down here to hide.”

“Can I help you, mistah?” the young woman who took orders asked. Her straightened hair was maybe two feet long and equal parts pink, turquoise, and dark brown. She had golden pins through either side of her upper lip and eyes that had seen things.

“Large coffee,” I said. “Dark roast.”

For some reason my order, or its delivery, made her smile. As had been its purpose since humans became a species, the smile socialized me.

“How are you today?” I asked.

“Rather be out there with you, Mr. McGill.”

My reaction to being recognized was twofold. First I lost the feeling of
invulnerability.
She had pierced my imagined force field with just a few words. Then I wondered who she was. Maybe twenty and a few pounds over the limit imposed by American TV, movies, and fashion magazines…

“Sherry, right?” I said. “Shelly’s friend.”

“That’s good,” she complimented. “I was only over at your house one time.”

“Can you guys hurry it up,” a man’s voice said from behind. “Some people have trains to catch.”

I turned around, the full 180 degrees. He was, of course, a few inches taller, what passes for white, and younger than me by two decades. But that wasn’t enough. I’d lost my immunity to injury but my super strength was solidly in place. The gray-suited man gazed at me with his light brown eyes and then looked away.

When I turned back, my coffee was there in front of me, Sherry smiling over it.

“How much I owe you?”

“This one’s on the house,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“If you come back sometime in the morning it won’t be so busy.”

“I will,” I said and then moved to the side.

I had never been flirted with by one of my daughter’s friends. At most other times I’d have probably shrugged it off, but Marella’s explosive intrusion had torn up the tracks of my regular route and I was now on foot in unfamiliar territory.

“Professor,” I said, standing at his table.

“Leonid,” he answered in a soft, sophisticated tone of erudition. “How are you?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “I was passing through and thought I’d drop by and say hello.”

“Sit down. Drink your coffee.”

I lowered into the chair at his side so that I could see out and see him at the same time.

“How are you?” the Professor asked again.

“My wife tried to commit suicide a few months back,” I said. “Dealing with her, I may have gone off orbit a bit.”

The Professor was one of the select few whose vision I trusted. There are all kinds of categories in the streetwise intelligence business. There was Sweet Lemon Charles, who had given up the Life for poetry but still wandered the old streets and passed rumors that most likely had roots in reality. Alphonse Rinaldo was the most powerful man in city government and yet he had no official post. You only went to Rinaldo for Category 5 difficulties. Luke Nye had specific information on criminals only.

But the Professor was another thing completely. Born Drake Imago, he was once an Ivy League philosophy professor teaching in the gulfs between Hegel and Marx, Marx and the Frankfurt School, the Frankfurt School and certain political activists in ’60s European and American politics. He’d had a rivalry with another professor, a man named Hendricks, for years. Hendricks always stayed ahead of the Professor, getting the bigger grants, awards, and more prestigious accolades.

One day the Professor came home to find Hendricks in flagrante delicto with his wife. After calling the police, the Professor sat down to his manual typewriter and, with his hands still wet with the blood of his victims, typed a confession starting with the first crime committed against him by Hendricks: when he stole the Professor’s idea about
Obfuscative Language and the Tyranny of Philosophy
.

Receiving a life sentence, the Professor spent twelve years in maximum security—this because he showed no remorse for the brutality of his crime. During the first eighteen months he’d been beaten, raped, slashed, nearly starved to death by criminals that stole his food, and driven temporarily insane by the sights, sounds, and smells of nonstop human distress. That, as he is happy to tell all and sundry, was his basic education.

Then he met a young man named Bronk. When the Professor was being beset by a rat-faced con with tattoos all around the edges of his face, Bronk saved him and asked if he could write down what Bronk felt. Completely illiterate, Bronk had committed a string of armed robberies and was then incarcerated without having the chance to communicate with his family. His mother lived in the hills of Kentucky and didn’t have a phone. The Professor sat down with Bronk and after a series of twelve questions he crafted a letter that expressed things that Bronk had not even realized he felt.

For the next ten and a half years Bronk and the Professor were cellmates, bosom buddies, and maybe even lovers. No one bothered the Professor after that, and he became a fount of information and advice for the gen pop of the maximum security prison.

“I’m sorry,” the Professor said about my wife—Katrina. “How’s she doing now?”

“Okay. All right. I have her in a sanatorium because she’s still a little loopy.”

The old man gave a sad smile and sipped his coffee.

You go to Sweet Lemon, Rinaldo, or Luke Nye when you want more or less specific help. The Professor is a thinker and a witness to the world whose insights change the lenses of perception.

If an ex-con comes to him he might have a line on a legitimate day job or maybe a connection for something a little less savory. If you find yourself at a crossroads in life he’s the traffic light. And if you just drop by…who knows? The Professor’s eyes are always open, collecting data like a water filter catching all the impurities the seven seas have to offer.

“Got anything for me, Drake?” I asked.

“I’ve seen your son Twilliam walking back and forth down here a few times,” he said. “He was wearing tattered blue jeans and a T-shirt with a grease stain on the back hem.”

“Twill was?”

“He was indeed.”

I finished my coffee, put a twenty-dollar bill down on the table, and bid the educated killer good-bye.

I
reached Tivoli Rest Home a few minutes past 7:30 that evening. I decided to walk up to East Eighty-fourth rather than take a subway or taxi because the meals were served at 6:00 and the staff, mainly nuns, were strict about allowing their patients to eat in peace.

“Mr. McGill,” Sister Alona Alfred said in greeting as I entered the admissions hall.

“Evenin’, Sister.”

“I haven’t seen you in a few days. I was wondering where you were.”

“Down in Philadelphia doing a job.”

“Were you successful?” she asked. Sister Alona was youngish, in her thirties, and had a complexion that a runway model would have slashed for. Her smile was both infectious and as far from seductive as one could get.

“I reunited a married couple,” I said.

“Bless you.”

Katrina’s private room was on the sixth floor of the nine-story building. I don’t think she’d left that floor since the day I delivered her six weeks earlier.

The door was open so I didn’t knock. She was lying in the bed; actually she was languishing there. Her left arm was thrown up over her eyes and her right hand hung over the side of the mattress. The blankets were on the bed but not over her because the small room was warm. There had been a cold snap and the heat had been turned on—high.

There was a chair and a window, pine flooring, gray-green walls, and a cream-colored ceiling that would not tolerate a very tall man. There was a vase of flowers, yellow pansies, on the writing desk she never used and a stack of fashion magazines that our daughter, Shelly, had brought a month before. They hadn’t been touched.

I went to stand over her but said nothing.

After a few moments she let the left arm fall to the side. Her pale eyes were staring at me. All I recognized was in that steady stare. Before she tried to kill herself Katrina’s beauty denied her fifty-five years. She could have been forty and, on her better days, thirty-five. She exercised and used all the right unguents to preserve the skin and eliminate wrinkles. But now her flesh seemed to sag and you could see all her years like Marley’s chains.

“Leonid.”

I sat. “Baby.”

“I vas vorried about you.” Usually her inexplicable Swedish accent didn’t come out unless she was drunk. Maybe the drugs they had her on also caused it.

“Just a job,” I said. “I told Twill to tell you that.”

“He did. He came tvice and sent Mardi once. She seems a little vorried.”

“How about Dimitri and Tatyana?”

“She comes every morning before school but D gets too upset to see me like this.”

The wounds from her attempted suicide were there on her wrists; jagged lacerations that had cut deep. She looked like she was dying, and our Dimitri loved her more than anything. Of course he’d stay away.

“We should talk, Katrina.”

Making a monumental effort, she pushed herself up until she could rest her back against the wall that abutted the head of her bed. In rising she seemed to shrug off a decade or so.

“What is it, Leonid?” she asked.

“I’m worried about you, baby. You don’t seem to be getting any better but the doctors all say that there’s nothing physically wrong.”

“They ask me how I feel every Tuesday and I tell them that I have lost interest in living. Then they go away and I fall asleep again. I’ve been dreaming about my parents and my brother.” Somehow sitting upright stripped her of the accent from a country that she had never even visited.

“So you still want to kill yourself?”

“No,” she said, looking toward the small, shaded window. “No. I don’t want to live but I don’t have the will to try suicide again.”

“Did you tell the doctors that?”

“They never ask.”

She turned her gaze to me. I wondered if I should take her home; maybe in familiar circumstances she might begin to feel better.

“Do you remember when we used to watch the television in the little front room after the children were in bed?” she asked.

“Whenever I wasn’t on a job.”

“I’d make you another supper and you would sometimes rub my feet.”

“I always liked that fourth meal. You’re the best cook in the world,” I said, and I meant it, too.

“Remember what you would say when we watched
Law & Order
and all those crazy crimes?”

“ ‘Sometimes I think that everybody in the world is crazy,’ ” I said, quoting myself, “ ‘except for me and you—and sometimes I wonder about you.’ ”

The smile that crossed her face brought back the old Katrina for a moment, surfacing in the gloom like the body of a whale breaking the surface and then disappearing beneath the waves.

“Would you like it if I brought you home, Katrina?” I asked. “Dimitri and Tatyana could move back in and I’d watch TV with you and rub your feet.”

She mustered only half a smile and said, “Sometimes I’m too weak or too sad to go to the bathroom by myself. I won’t be a burden.”

“Do they make you walk?” I asked.

“Every day at four. I spend an entire hour preparing for Sister Marie to come and pull me out of bed. We walk from here down to the elevator. She asks me if I want to go down to the recreation area in the basement and I tell her, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ ”

I wanted to say something kind, to slap her and tell her to snap out of it. I would have torn out my hair if I wasn’t already bald.

Katrina looked down at her hands. “I’ve disappointed you.”

“No, baby,” I assured her. “You’re going through a hard time and we just have to see it through.”

“You are a good man, Leonid.”

“We both know that’s a lie, Katrina.”

“No, Leonid,” she said with conviction if not strength in her voice. “I strayed. Twill and Shelly are not your children. You have always known but you raised them with love and you never ran away. You were always there for us.”

“That’s like complimenting a beaver for having big buckteeth,” I said, “or a lion for his deep voice.”

“Or a man,” Katrina said, “for living by his nature.”

I felt uncomfortable receiving these accolades. Katrina and I had been alternately bickering and cheating on each other for decades, and now there she was speaking truth to me. We hadn’t been partners or lovers for so long that in a way we were strangers.

“You have anything you want me to do about the kids?” I asked. Maybe thinking about them would help her make it down to the recreation room.

“Twill is into something,” she said. “Do you have him on some case?”

“No. He’s just studying the tapes I recorded when I was following people.”

“When he came to see me he was too happy. You know when things are good with him he just acts, I don’t know, kind of cool. But when something is going on he gets that glitter in his eyes.”

I knew the look. The problem was I hadn’t seen my son in seven days.

“The Professor said he saw him wandering around the lower level of Penn Station, said he had his shirttails out.”

“You saw Drake?”

I’d forgotten that the academic ex-con had come to a picnic we once gave. He and Katrina talked for hours about ancient recipes he once studied. He might have even written a monograph on the subject as a footnote to his doctoral thesis.

“What about Shelly?” I asked.

“That man followed her up to SUNY.”

“Seldon Arvinil?”

“He left his wife and daughter to be with our little girl. I suppose she’s happy though. Who am I to deny her that?”

“You’re her mother.”

“If I was a good mother she wouldn’t have needed an older man to shelter her heart.”

Hearing these words reminded me of Sweet Lemon Charles for the second time that day. The next time I saw the prison-made poet I’d ask him what he knew about the poetry of despair.