If I Should Die Before I Die (10 page)

I guess his kind aren't much good at that, one on one.

On the contrary, I became like his long-lost buddy. It got me one of those drunken, rambling, more-than-you-want-to-know life stories. The sucker he'd mentioned turned out to be his current stepfather. The stepfather was always on his case, riding him, checking up on him, harassment and threats, and all because of the bucks. Other than for the bucks, the sucker didn't give a damn about him. But the bucks belonged to his whore of a mother, who didn't give a damn about him either, never had, as long as he kept out of the way.

“Chris' sake,” I remembered him declaiming, “you'd think I was a criminal!”

Which brought the snorting on, violently, and tears leaking out of his eyes.

I remember him tacking off toward the john where, I expect, he puked his guts out again, and back again, amazingly, for another double Scotch. And you may well wonder: Didn't I ask him some questions of my own—like about Annette Costello and Rosemary Sutter, to name two? I wonder too. Worse, I think I even may have.

I remember the crowd at the bar thinning out, and a Last Call from the bartenders and one of them shouting out “Absolutely Final Last Call” which, for some reason, brought a ragged cheer from the remaining drinkers. I'd been paying as I went, a twenty following a twenty, but the bar kept a running tab for McCloy. Now the bartender brought it over with a pen, and without looking, McCloy scrawled his signature across the bottom.

We headed for the door, the street. At least I did. I was alone when I got to the door, and when I turned around, McCloy was arguing with one of the bartenders. I went back for him.

“Where's everybody?” I heard him shout.

“I told you, Cloy, they didn't show,” the bartender answered, exasperated. Then, to me: “He's looking for some of his friends. He says they were supposed to meet him here. Well, I can't help that, we're closing.”

“… s'posed to meet …,” McCloy was saying.

“You mean the ones at the Rosebud?” I said.

“Rosebud's, yeah.”

“They took off, remember? You came here alone.”

“… s'posed to meet!” he said angrily.

“Well, they didn't make it,” I said.

“Come on, guys,” from the bartender. “Closing time.”

I remember getting him to the door. He still wanted to stay. Then, as suddenly, he didn't. Outside the pavements were glistening under the dim lights, but the rain had stopped and the air was cold. McCloy, though, didn't seem to feel a thing. He tacked along the sidewalk, building line to gutter, and I guess I tacked with him.

“Come on, Midnight Rider,” he called out, “let's go to Rosebud's.”

“That's closed,” I said. “I'll get you home.”

“No home. Let's go someplace else.”

“No else,” I think I said. “Sleep.”

He stopped abruptly, turned, stared at me.

“Not sleep,” he said. “Hey, where's everybody? Where's …”

He said some name I didn't get. But the panicky look in his eyes, in one of those weird, short snatches of lucidity you get when you're drunk, reminded me of something else. The Counselor's Wife's tapes, the story he'd told about his friend's insomnia.
If I should die before I die
.

His
story, all right. Not a friend's.

He headed off across the avenue, I behind him. The traffic lights could have been green, red, or blue, but somebody protects drunks from accidents in the middle of the night.

We somehow got to his block. He careened along the wall of his apartment house. I remember one end of the white scarf now trailing behind him.

He turned toward me right near the entrance, tilting against the brick facade.

“Hey, Rider,” he said. “Whatever you want. Want a bunny? Free of charge. Want to beat up on a bunny? Want to …?”

I got no chance to answer, though. In mid-sentence his body started to slide down the wall. And down he sat, on the pavement, listing to one side, head down and nodding.

Out like a light. Finally.

I stood over him for a minute. I remember thinking he looked like one poor excuse for a killer, right then. If he was a killer. If he wasn't. Either way. I peered in through the locked entrance doors of the building, spotting a black man in a cardigan sweater nodding on a straight chair just inside. I remember he had a newspaper on his lap. Maybe it was the super Bobby Derr had greased, maybe not. I rang the night bell and watched him jerk awake.

He came to his side of the door without opening it, and I pointed McCloy's body out to him. Then he unlocked, and together we loaded McCloy into the little vestibule where I held him while the black man opened the inner door.

“I'll take him up for you,” I said to the black man.

“Never mind,” he answered. “I'm used to it. They always come home like this, one or the other.”

“I want to make sure he gets home.”

“Never mind,” he repeated. “He's home now. You're not.” Then somehow he was standing between McCloy and me, propping McCloy up with one hand and pushing me back out the front door with the other. “You go home now too.”

I guess I made it as far as the Fiero, but apparently no farther. The next thing I knew, it was 7
A
.
M
., and I woke up behind the wheel in the East Eighties, and a blinding sun was staring right at me with its fingers in my eyes.

PART TWO

CHAPTER

6

I've probably given the wrong impression of the Counselor. Dour, cold, unfeeling, implacable—I've seen or heard all those words used to describe him, and a lot worse too, usually by people who've tangled with him professionally and lost. But he's also capable of humor, usually with a cutting edge, even of charm, even, on occasion, of warmth. His problem mostly is that he's a creature of habit. Circumstances which, for whatever reasons, break up his routine usually bring out the worst in him. For instance he'd complained about the Magister lunch ever since the meeting with Barger, and I'd have been willing to bet the house that he'd find a way to duck out.

And would have lost.

Maybe the setting contributed to his good mood. And the weather. Also, apparently, our hostess.

“Are you sure you don't want something a little stronger?” she asked, turning to him.

The Counselor, I knew, never drank anything stronger at lunch than Campari and soda, and that's what he'd asked for. To me the stuff's like drinking cough medicine, and maybe Margie Magister, her hand pausing near the bottle on the rolling bar, thought the same.

To my surprise, he answered: “What are you having, Mrs. Magister?”

“Whisky and a little water,” she said. “One piece of ice. Scotch whisky. But I want you to call me Margie.”

Margie with a hard
g
.

“Margie,” the Counselor repeated. “Yes, I'll take the same as you.”

Unprecedented.

Roy Barger ordered a white wine, I a beer, both poured from bottles stored in a silvery ice bucket, and then the four of us stood near the terrace parapet, glasses in hand, looking out over Central Park.

“How can people hate New York?” Margie Magister said with a sweep of her hand. “I think it's magical.”

By one of those quirks of New York weather, we were having a rerun of summer, the temperature back in the low 70's, and the buildings lining the 59th Street end of the park and the glass business towers behind them shone in a strong midday sun. The air all but sparkled, and a soft breeze blew in from the southwest. From that point of view, that height and distance, yes, she had a point. Having nine figures at her disposal, give or take, may have helped the magic along too.

Small and chic, that's how she struck me. She had black hair cut short, with slanting bangs across her forehead, olive skin, expressive angular features, dark eyes hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. She wore a black pants-and-shirt outfit under a tailored olive-colored blazer with the collar turned up, and as dazzling an array of jewelry as you'll see in the middle of the day, even in New York. Rings on her fingers, a diamond-headed stickpin in one lapel of the blazer, and a diamond choker necklace in which the stones, you'd normally have figured, were too big to be anything but glass.

She was pretty too, in that miniature European way. The kind of woman, I thought, who probably devoted a lot of time to turning herself out to look both casual and elegant.

She served us lunch at a terrace table set for four under a large striped umbrella, helped by a blond youth called Edward, in black pants and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, whom I recognized from Bud Fincher's reports. She put the Counselor on her right with, as she pointed out, the best view of the city. I sat at her left, Roy Barger across from her. She apologized for the size of the meal—a throwback, she said, to Europe, where people used to eat the big meal in the middle of the day before they learned American habits. We should eat as little, or as much, as we wanted. The Counselor maintained that the European custom was more civilized, and they discussed the finer points of the spread, things like where the smoked salmon had come from, how the roast veal had been prepared, whether strawberries were better with English-style clotted cream or crème fraiche from France. As for me, with my American brown-bagging habit, it was closer to a banquet than lunch, and when I made the mistake of switching from beer to white wine, a fruity-tasting version from the Loire Valley, I started thinking things like: well, sure, New York is magical; and why shouldn't she run Magister Companies? Because somewhere—between, say, the salad and the Chilean strawberries—the conversation had switched to business. It was Margie who'd switched it, and very directly.

“Charles,” she said, “I know Roy has told you what it is I want, what is my objective, but I want you to hear it from me, okay?”

“Of course,” the Counselor said, holding his wine glass up as she poured.

“I want to run the Magister business,” she said, her head tilted toward him. “I want to control the business and to run it. It is as simple as that. Do you think I'm wrong?”

The Counselor seemed to consider it for a minute.

“I don't think I have an opinion as to right or wrong,” he said, “but the question which comes to mind is: Why? Why do you want that?”

“Why? Well, I'll tell you why, Charles. Firstly,” grasping the little finger of her left hand, “I think it would be fun. I've never done that before. Secondly,” adding the fourth finger to her grip, “I think definitely I would succeed. And finally,” adding the middle finger, “because of the children. The grandchildren too. But because of the children, there's no alternative.”

“I don't think I understand that,” the Counselor said. “Why is there no alternative?”

“Well, the children are hopeless, you see? We all know that,” glancing quickly at Barger, then at me, then back at the Counselor. “It is not their fault, poor darlings. It was Bob's fault. He never trusted them in the business. I used to tell him that, but of course it was too late by then. For him they were always children. Yes, of course he took them into the business, but they were always …” She paused, then arched her neck and laughed aloud. “Ahhh, New York! How I love New York … the Yiddish language in New York!
Schleppers
, do you know the word, Charles? That's all he ever let them be in the business:
schleppers
. Not Sally so much, she's too headstrong. But the boys. They're so weak, they're not really men yet. Young Bob, do you see him running the business? He never liked me, but I don't blame him for that. His mother died; I wasn't his mother; his father loved me; his father married me; I was a threat to him. All natural things. But does that mean he should be running a big business?”

The Counselor didn't answer, but Margie didn't seem to need him to. Her voice, which had softened while she went about burying the Magister children, now took on a sharp edge.

“I know what you think. Everybody thinks the same thing. I'm an opportunist, isn't that what they say? Worse things. Well, I say to them: What's so wrong, in the land of opportunity, with being an opportunist? Isn't that how you're supposed to be, in New York? In Europe, of course, it would be impossible. Unthinkable for a woman. But in America?

“I'll tell you the truth, Charles—but off the record, please. When I married Bob, I
was
an opportunist. I made a calculation. That's
very
European. He was old, dying, when I met him. Me? I was nothing, and I was tired of being nothing. It wasn't so much of a marriage, but I made my … how shall I say? … accommodations. He needed a nurse, not a wife. He was cranky, sometimes nasty. Sometimes he wet his bed at night, so I changed his sheets. But he loved me, and I gave him … what? … two more years of life. Do you know what he used to say to me when he was in the nasty moods? ‘It is better than being dead.' So. He had two more years of life because of me, is that such a crime?”

She took her sunglasses off and gazed intently at the Counselor, insistent on his reaction.

“I would have called it admirable,” he said. “But is what you're trying to tell me that that gave you the right to run Magister?”

She shrugged, and her lower lip protruded upward in a sort of sulky, pouty expression.

“You're so harsh, Charles,” she said. “Roy said you would be harsh. No, not the
right
. But it's what Bob would have wanted.”

“Do you have documentation of that?” the Counselor asked.

“Only up here,” she answered, tapping the side of her forehead with her forefinger.

By this time we'd gotten through the strawberries, with or without cream, and into the coffee and cognac. She served the coffee in those little demitasse cups I can't stand. I mean: one swallow and it's over. Anyway, I felt the Counselor start to stir.