When the Thrill Is Gone (30 page)

“Can we get together for dinner tomorrow?” I asked, in some way hoping for another day.

“Maybe we should let things cool down for a while.”

I let those words settle for a moment and then said, “Let me have the number.”

I should have been happy that Aura was jealous of Chrystal. After all, that meant she wanted something, that she hadn’t stopped feeling for me. But that was weak consolation. This being the case, it was hard for me to ask the next question.

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“May I, um, speak to Chrystal?”

There came a few seconds of muffled silence and then, “Hello? Mr. McGill?”

“Do you trust your husband?”

“I want to.”

“I don’t see how what happened to your sister happened without his involvement. Shawna sent your brother to try and get money out of him, I’m pretty sure of that.”

“Where’s Tally? I’ve tried his cell phone but it just goes to voicemail.”

“He’s sick, jaundice. They got him in a hospital in the Bronx.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

“I really don’t know. I’ll be happy to take you to him, but first I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I’m going to call you this evening . . .”

THE NEXT CALL rang once before it was answered.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Tyler.”

“Mr. McGill.”

“Chrystal has agreed to talk to you.”

“Where is she?”

“It’s not that easy. You got two dead wives and her sister was murdered. She’s going to call you sometime this evening.”

“When?”

“When she calls.” I liked giving powerful men a hard time. But it also made sense to keep him off balance. If he was the bad man I suspected, he might make a mistake.

“Why should I trust you, Mr. McGill?”

“What does trust have to do with it? All you got to do is sit by your phone from six to midnight and wait for a call.”

I hung up on him. That felt good.

AFTER THAT I went to a little alcove that allowed me a view of pretty much the whole library floor, including the elevator entrance, from a half-hidden vantage point behind a corner and a potted fern.

Usually I like lying in wait. That’s what detectives do, they sit and watch and wait. If you spend enough time in any one spot you begin to notice patterns. After mapping out the geometrical design of the activity of any room or street you start to see where the model breaks down. It is at this point that your job begins.

But that afternoon I was nervous, antsy. Not one connection in my life felt easy. My children and wife, Gordo and Aura, even my client didn’t fit in her proper place. There was a killer on the loose and I didn’t know what he looked like, nor was I certain about his relationship to the crime. Rather than setting a trap, I felt as if I were in hiding, afraid of some monstrous consequence to my helplessness and stupidity.

Such were my thoughts when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the slender and yet elegant profile of my son.

Twill was wearing dark slacks and a light-green T-shirt. His shoes were also dark—fabric, not leather. He hadn’t taken the elevator. He’d probably charmed Jeanie into showing him the stairs. This maneuver would allow him to slip into the room and look around in much the same way that I might have.

I smiled because Twill was good, very good; but I was still better.

I watched him move around the periphery trying to suss out who might be the mysterious Beat Murdoch.

After moving forward with no real plan, Twill went to one of the small round pine tables in the center of the room and sat. From there he slowly and meticulously scanned the entire room. Toward the end of this intense study he came across my smiling face.

“Pops?” he mouthed.

I got up and sauntered over to his post.

Taking a seat, I said, “Hey, Twill, what are you doing here?”

“Meetin’ somebody. A friend. What about you?”

“Me too.”

“Who?”

I smiled and put my left palm down on the table.

“This shit is gonna have to stop, boy.”

“What?” he said, still looking for a way out.

“You know what I’m talking about. Those MetroCards.”

Twill bit the right side of his lower lip, squinted with that eye, and let his head tilt to the right. It was something like the reaction I used to get from an opponent after delivering a good left hook to the body.

“Damn, Pops,” he said. “How’d you get on to me?”

“Twill,” I said, “I love you, son. I would do anything to protect you, even from yourself. But you got to straighten up. I’m not gonna be around forever.”

Twill sat back and shook his head. I was the only person in the world who could still amaze him.

“What did you think you were doing?” I asked.

“Poor people need to ride the rails, Pop,” he said. “It’s not like I’m takin’ all that much, and I’m providing a service for them that’s under the poverty line. I see this more like a political statement than anything else.”

“A political statement?”

“Yeah. Like Joe Stalin. You know, he was a bank robber before he became the king’a Russia.”

The events and characters of the past are never in control of their own historical commentary,
I remembered my father once saying.

I laughed—way too loudly for that particular room.

“Son,” I said.

“Yeah, Pops?”

“Please.”

“What?”

“I need you to take a period of four years to be guided by me. Four years where you take my lead and don’t break any laws without conferring with me first. It’ll be like a college education, with the exception that you’ll be the only student in your class.”

“How does that work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t, but I’ll figure out something.”

“Okay, Pops. I’ll wait for your lead.”

“You have to give up this counterfeiting business now.”

“Okay,” he said as easily as if I had asked him to pass the gravy.

“What about your partners?”

“I did the whole thing online. They don’t know who I am—or at least they don’t know that they know. I’ll just say I’m turning the business over to them. I got the read/write stripe machine and Internet interface in a basement in Queens.”

I ORDERED a cognac and Twill had green tea. We talked for a while longer. I promised to hold the money he’d made thus far and he accepted my custodianship. He told me again that he didn’t see what was wrong with what he was doing and I told him to believe in me for the time being.

When I suggested that it was time to leave he got a little cagey and said, “Let me go out there first, Pops. Gimme five minutes and then you go.”

“Why?”

“I got these four dudes out there layin’ for Beat Murdoch. You know, with guns an’ shit.”

51

I CALLED HOME on the way over to the apartment Aura set me up with. Katrina answered after seven rings.

“Hello?”

“The old man still walkin’ on his own?”

“His blood work is amazing, Leonid. The doctors have him and Elsa down there right now to redo everything.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Remission.”

“No.”

“Remission.” The repetition of the word proved Katrina’s deep knowledge of my soul. She understood my fears and distrust and that I hadn’t traveled very far from my early adolescence when my father abandoned us and my mother died soon after. She knew that I needed her to repeat the word in the tone of the emotion it carried.

“He is very healthy, Leonid. He is strong again.”

I closed my eyes and stood stock-still in the middle of the busy walkway. People bumped into me and made angry comments but I didn’t care. This was the most wonderful, and therefore the most dangerous, thing that had happened in my life over the past year.

Remission. Survival when the odds are against you. Somebody you love who doesn’t leave, doesn’t die.

“Leonid,” Katrina said through the Bluetooth in my ear.

“I have to go, Katrina.”

“But—”

“I have to go.”

“I want to talk to you about Dimitri.”

“If you’re worried you don’t have to be. Between me and Twill he’s fine. And if you’re worried about his girlfriend . . . well, I am, too. But what you gonna do when a man falls like that?”

“He’s a boy.”

“Yeah, maybe. But she is most definitely a woman.”

“Leonid.”

“If I don’t hang up this phone and get my head together I’ll probably be dead before morning. Do you understand that?”

“I will talk to you at breakfast.”

WHAT I SAID to Katrina was absolutely true. The elation I felt over Gordo’s possible survival threw all of my natural defenses into disarray. I wanted to celebrate, to dance in the streets and drink down a whole bottle of brandy. I had mourned that boxing trainer the way the Apostles had grieved over Jesus. He might as well have been dead and buried, but here he was, maybe risen and alive.

I stopped at a little brown stoop on Eighteenth between Sixth and Seventh. There I sat, trying to remember that this was just a lull between rounds, that my opponent had been playing with me up until now and that the possibility of getting knocked out was real, and even probable.

There is no victory until the final victory,
my father used to say. His words came back to me and I sighed.
Let your comrades celebrate in their foxholes and their trenches, but you remember that the war is still raging and that your enemy is sharpening his bayonets even while your friends laugh and sing.

Those words got me on my feet. They propelled me down the street toward a resolution that was uncertain at best.

I HAD MADE it to within seven blocks of my destination when my phone sounded again. I looked at the little blue screen and hit the green button.

“Hey, Z.”

“Mr. McGill.”

“What you got for me?”

“Do you think I’m beautiful?”

I stopped again.

“What?” There was a smile on my face—I could feel it.

“I want to know what you think I look like.”

I drew a deep breath in through my nostrils and took a step.

“Zephyra,” I began, “beauty is your ugly-duckling little cousin who’s been hiding in the corner ever since you walked in the room. If you were my girl I’d put shutters on the windows and break every camera in the house.”

She giggled and said, “You’re a fool.”

I nodded.

“I’m serious,” she said into the unseen silence.

“I’m right, too, girl. And I’m sure you don’t need my word for it. So tell me what’s wrong?”

“I kinda like Charles.”

“You mean Bug?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“I always liked talking to him,” she said. “From the first time you took us out to lunch. I told him to lose weight. I really shouldn’t have done that, but he wanted to go out with me and I didn’t know what to say.”

“He’s working out three hours a day. Must’a lost twenty pounds so far.”

“I know. I don’t want to hurt him, Leonid.” That was the first time she ever called me by my first name. It was my week for firsts. “And I know if we . . . get intimate I’ll probably end up dropping him.”

“There’s no problem there, Z.”

“But he’s so serious. He
wants
me.”

“Just tell him you can’t be like that right now. Tell him that he can go out with you on Wednesdays but don’t ask about Friday nights. Tell him that you’re still playing the field and that if he wants more he needs to go someplace else.”

“But—”

“Tell him that and let him make up his own mind. For him it will be a mitzvah.”

“What’s that?”

“Something that only a woman like you can do for the man he will become someday.”

AFTER THAT CALL with Zephyra I was calm again. I don’t know what it was about her wish to keep her beauty in check that eased my own fears, but I walked a little faster—and made one last call.

There was no answer but I got a call back in less than a minute.

“Hey, LT,” he said.

“You in place?”

“Uh-huh.”