When the Thrill Is Gone (20 page)

“How many of those suits do you own?” Hush asked as we walked along the pathway beside NYU’s monolithic library.

“Four now,” I said. “It used to be only three but I bought one to keep in the office in case Katrina puts the other three in the cleaners at the same time.”

That was a lot of meaningless chatter for us and so we strolled along in silence for a few blocks.

When we were waiting for the light at Houston Street it was my turn to speak.

“Two women,” I began. “Allondra North and Pinky Todd. The first was lost at sea, fell from a yacht off the Florida coast. The second was killed by a homeless man on Fifth Avenue. He hit her in the head with a stone and then escaped in broad daylight.”

“I remember that,” Hush said as the light turned green. “The guy just ran up behind her and whacked her where the skull meets the spine.”

My heart tittered. It wasn’t a real laugh but an inner revelation of anxiety. That was when I explained that both women were purported to be having problems with the same man—their husband.

“The woman who told me all this,” I said, “was just pretending to be his wife. She was murdered in front of her children not two days ago.”

We were walking in the touristy part of SoHo then. At one time this was a neighborhood of warehouses and small Italian shops, but now there were restaurants and hotels, and street vendors selling everything from big silver rings to paintings of naked women with fat bottoms.

Hush had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the sidewalk until we passed Spring, headed south for Canal. Then he looked up at me.

Lower SoHo was dark and silent at that time of evening. It was a place where a man like Hush could speak freely.

“You remember what you said to me on this street five months ago?” he asked.

I nodded, admitting to the shadows that I did.

It had been a lesson that my sometimes anarchist, sometimes Communist, but always revolutionary father had drilled into me and my younger brother when I was nine and Nikita was seven.

Some people live outside the sphere of Law and Man
, dear old dad used to say.
They see something off the road or follow after a tune that no one else can hear. This solitary event leads them on a journey that could be taken by no other. They’re gone for years from their families and the world. They have fantastic adventures and battle for the freedom of all men.

Then one day the same flash or color or song that led them away from everything and everybody leads them back into a life where they don’t belong. All of a sudden there are rules and customs that, if you touch any part of them, will hold you, trapped.

Tolstoy McGill meant this as a warning for the true radical or militant. You were never to abandon your goal—not even for love.

It occurred to me one day that my father’s cockeyed warning contained so much truth that Hush might see it as a positive illumination of his transition from murderer to family man rather than a signpost cautioning him to turn back into the darker ways.

“How did you do it, LT?” Hush asked.

He stopped walking, so I did, too. Two women who were a dozen paces behind us crossed the street almost as if that was their plan all along.

I smiled at the innate intelligence of the young women in short dresses and bright colored heels. That smirk was also in recognition (for at least the hundredth time) that Hush, possibly the most dangerous individual man in the world, considered me his peer and maybe even an example of the way a man was supposed to live his life.

“You still going to that Buddhist monastery?” I asked.

Hush shook his head and then we were walking again.

“Now that Tamara and Thackery are here I like to spend the time with them. It was either the job or the retreat.”

Hush drove a limo for an upscale New York service. I never understood why. He was a millionaire many times over but he worked four days a week driving around people who would have run screaming if they had any idea who he was.

“But you still meditate, right?”

“Yeah. I do an hour or so in the morning, and sometimes, when things get cold in my head, I hit it at night, too.”

“When you were at the monastery they talked about enlightenment sometimes.”

We were crossing Canal. The street vendors were closed by then and it was pretty empty. Hush and I turned left, walking over toward Broadway.

“They did,” he said.

“I once heard a student of Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan master, say that meditation is a gesture toward enlightenment, though that was a state of knowledge that we would never truly attain,” I said. “I think he meant that we’ll never be wholly in the real world. It’s like we’re shadows, invisible to most people. What we have to do is concentrate real hard just to be seen at all. And it’s that concentration that may one day normalize us, make us members of the group.”

“But what about our sins?” the ex-contract killer asked.

Sins?

My surprise at his word choice must have shown in my face because Hush said, “I know that what I’ve done is wrong, Leonid. I feel it every time I look at my son.”

I smiled. We turned left onto Broadway. When I looked up at the sky all I could see was darkness. The words came to me from a place I could rarely connect with.

“It’s a luxury to feel guilt, Hush. Little Thackery might sneak into the cupboard and take a cookie when his mother told him to leave them alone. Afterwards he feels guilty. That’s because he’s innocent and needs to confess because he was a bad boy but still able to be forgiven. That’s not us. There is no forgiveness for us. For people like you and me, guilt is an indulgence. It’s meaningless, like a platter of caviar served up on the front lines of a war. Our confession, our clemency, comes from doing what’s right.”

I wanted to say more but the tap shut off.

Hush stopped walking again.

The look in his eyes was angry and hurt, like a suitor who has just been snubbed.

I’m used to giving people bad news.
Your wife and your best friend . . .
Things like that. Some people get mad when they hear things they don’t want to believe. That’s all part of the job—but I wasn’t so blasé about the impact of my words walking north on dark Broadway with Hush.

He winced and I wondered.

He looked both ways and I wondered some more.

“I can’t say for sure but I think you’ve run across the path of a man named Bisbe,” he said and I realized that I’d been holding my breath.

“Bisbe?”

“I was the last word when it came to killing,” Hush continued, nodding. “Meat and potatoes. Never fancy unless I had to be. But if I had to be, I could kill a man with a hailstorm. But Bisbe’s crazy. You hire him to knock off a man with a bullet behind the head and BB’d kill him with a tooth infection or a suicide. Superstitious people say he’s some kind of mystic. I think he’s just a madman.”

“Are you sure?”

“That he’s a madman?”

“That he killed these women.”

“Nothing’s for sure,” Hush said, “but for a homeless man to hit that woman with a perfect killing blow and then to disappear in broad daylight . . . safe is better than sorry.”

33

AS I EXPLAINED the particulars of the case, Hush and I walked back to his door. He took two steps up and stopped when he realized that I was not coming with him.

“You want some coffee?” he offered.

“No, thanks. I need to be getting along, figuring out what to do next.”

“If you want my advice I’d say take a vacation. I hear Tokyo’s nice.”

Warnings, even from Hush, always brought a smirk to my lips.

“My client left six kids to fend for themselves.”

“She lied to you.”

“So? Why should she be any different?”

Hush winced. This was an expression of his concern.

“Thanks for the talk, LT. I’m not a lost cause, you know.”

“Say good night to Tam and Thackery.”

“We have to do this again soon,” he said.

I nodded and turned away, ruminating over the little scenes of my life. I was like a bug that had learned to live close to, maybe even inside of, fire, so that the predators would be scared away—going to hell to keep the bad men off my tail.

Thinking of bugs, I pulled out my cell phone and punched a few digits.

He answered on the second ring, “Hey, LT.”

“Bug.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You get an answer?”

“An envelope with a MetroCard wrapped in a small sheet of lined notepaper. I took it down to the subway on my evening power-walk and ran it through the machine they got down there to show the amount. It had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents on it. The card looked a little beat up. I figure Twill has a read-write stripe machine and he gets people to pick up discarded cards in the subways. He might even be tapped into the MTA computer system. He takes the money you transfer and gives back more than four times as much.”

“You sound impressed,” I said.

“I am. I mean, it’s a pretty simple scheme, but it took your son to implement it. He’s only a kid but he’s way ahead of everybody else.”

“I’ll call you back,” I said, breaking off the connection.

“HELLO?”

“Twill?”

“Hey, Pop. What’s up?”

“Katrina there?”

“Mom went out with Dorrie to a movie.”

It was a phrase that might as well have been code for:
She was out with a man who had a Y-shaped scar on his left buttock.

“You hear from D?” I asked.

Twill hesitated. That was good for my purposes.

“Come on, boy, I know that Tatyana called and Dimitri borrowed money from Bertrand.”

“That Bertrand’s a dog, Dad,” Twill replied.

“I was asking you about Dimitri.”

“He’s in France, man. Flew to Warsaw, met Taty at the airport, and then they both winged it down to Nice. He called me because he needed some more cash.”

“He came to you because of all your savings from that box-boy job at the supermarket?”

Twill went quiet.

“Where’d you get the money, Twill?”

“I thought you wanted to find out about D.”

“Where’d you get the money to send to your brother?”

“It was only a couple a hundred. I used the money I got from Uncle Gordo that time.”

“You’re going to be eighteen soon, son.”

“Uh-huh. I know.”

“They bust you again and I won’t be able to get you out of it.”

“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ to get busted for, LT. My hands are clean.”

“Don’t jerk me around, son.”

“No sir, not me.”

“Okay. The next time Dimitri calls tell him I need to hear from him. All right?”

“You got it.”

After we said our goodbyes and got off I called Bug again.

“Hey, LT.”

“Can you hack into Twill’s account?”

“Can a hot knife cut through butter?”

“Empty it,” I said, “every centavo. Put it somewhere safe.”

“Okay.” There was reluctance in Bug’s voice.

“One day you’ll have kids,” I said in response to the hacker’s tone, “and when you do you’ll understand.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “I’ll get on this right now.”

34

I WAS ON NINTH STREET near Third Avenue. The night was electric but empty. There wasn’t much traffic of foot or tire, and though I was standing still, my mind was breaking all the speed limits.

Hush was rarely wrong about contract killers. He knew his profession and I had the good sense to avoid a fight that I was bound to lose.

Twill’s business had to be shut down but it wasn’t just that. I had to somehow stop my favorite son from drifting into a life of corruption. There was no way that he could comprehend, in his youthful confidence, how the weight of his actions would pile on him, on his soul.

I was making progress but it was like having taken three strides into a five-hundred-yard-wide minefield. I could see the other side. I could imagine walking on ground that wouldn’t blow up under my feet. But first I had to take that next step, and then the one after that.

“Excuse me, sir,” a man’s voice said in a tone of false deference.

A car door slammed shut.

There were footsteps of more than one man.

I smiled at the respite this minor threat offered.

“Yes, officer?” I said before turning around to meet the cops.

They were, of course, both taller than I. They were white, but that hardly mattered. Young men, they made the mistake of thinking that I was no threat because of my height and weight and obvious age.

“What’s going on?” the one on my left asked.

“I’m standing here on an empty street taking stock of my life such as it is.”

“You been drinking?” the other inquired. This one had a beauty mark on the left side of his face, half an inch from the nostril. Being a man, he probably called it a blemish.

“All my life,” I said. “But not in the last twelve hours.”

“Show us some ID,” Beauty asked.

“Why?”

“Come again?”

“I’m a middle-aged man, wearing a suit, standing alone on a public sidewalk with nothing in my hands. What about that is suspicious?”

The cops moved toward me—a movable barrier against my anger.

“Show us some ID,” the guy without a mole asked.

I closed my eyes, considering first the immediate response of civil disobedience. Then I gathered my intelligence, opened my eyes, and stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of my darkblue jacket.

Coming out with two laminated cards, I handed these to Beauty.

He took them and read the contents. It was my PI’s ID and driver’s license. Both of them had my real name, so the encounter was bound to continue.

“Wait here,” Beauty said to his partner and me.

He went to the squad car to call in. The police were always supposed to call in when they came across my name. I was infamous.

“Would you submit to a search of your person?” the cop left with me asked.

“By Beyoncé, if she asked nicely,” I replied.

The cop’s eyes tightened and my phone made a sound that I recognized.