She looked me in the eye for a long moment, nodded, and then said, “Okay,” like a confederate, or an accomplice.
I walked the thirty or so blocks back toward my empty apartment. I needed to be on the street to organize my thoughts. Like the table layout of Chambre du Roi, my mind was spiraling and off-center.
Marella was the event that had thrown me out of kilter though she wasn’t what bothered me. Hiram Stent and Josh Farth posed a mortal danger, but that was just business as usual now that I had taken up the dead man’s cause. It was Twill’s dilemma that concerned me most. He was down in a hole somewhere and I didn’t know if my arm was long enough to reach him.
At Broadway and Seventy-second at 11:47 I engaged Twill’s emergency line. He didn’t answer but twelve minutes and eight blocks later he called back.
“You kinda leanin’ on the emergency button, ain’t ya, Pops?” were his first words.
“I need you to come home,” I told him.
“In a few days.”
“Now.”
“Can’t right now.”
“Why not?”
“Tigers up in the garden and tigers down below,” he said paraphrasing his and my, and my father’s, favorite Nasrudin Sufi tale. It meant that any way he turned would mean his demise.
“That bad?” I asked.
“I’ll be home in seventy-two hours,” he said, and then he disconnected the call.
I was pressing the key into the downstairs lock of my apartment building door when he said, “Trot.”
Tolstoy wore light-colored trousers, a dark green T-shirt, and a tan windbreaker that was creased and stained. He was hatless, wore glasses, and was as unfamiliar to me as a father could be.
“I thought you was in the wind, man,” I told him.
“Never again.” He punctuated this solemn oath with a soldier’s abbreviated nod.
—
Back in the dining room, once again swilling cognac, my father and I faced each other across the hickory table.
“You should get over it,” he said to me.
“What’s that?”
“The rage you feel. The rage that drives you. You were an angry child and now you’re an angry man. It’s no good.”
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard something like that tonight.”
“I’m sorry, Trot. I was wrong.”
When listing my problems on the way back home from the Hotel Brown I had forgotten about my father and the anger he called up in me. I wanted to answer him but the only words that came underscored the fury that he’d already identified. It galled me that I was little more than a child in his presence, that every misstep I had taken in life could be traced back to him.
He was just an old man, an old black man that could have been a train porter or the Martiniquean ambassador to Cuba or Italy. He was a fool and I had been his fodder. The beast that Marella called up in me wanted to rend Tolstoy McGill. This simple truth made me smile.
“What?” my father asked.
“I’ll make you a deal, old man.”
“And what is that?”
“You agree to be a grandfather to my kids and a father-in-law to my wife and I’ll put away the grief.”
“Grief?”
The ex-sharecropper might have been a fool but he was sharp. I had meant to say that I would put away the anger and the rage but instead my tongue said “grief.” Grief. It was at that moment I realized that my entire life had been spent grieving the loss of my father and the death of my mom. Anger was just a shield; the rage simple background music for a child who had pitied himself for decades.
Was I really that shallow and self-involved?
“So what do you say, Clarence?” I asked, using my father’s given name — what he called his sharecropper name.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Answer my question.”
“Your children are my grandkids. Your wife is my daughter-in-law.”
I sat back in the spindly and surprisingly strong dining chair. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, feeling with that outbreath that I was released from the custody of grief.
“Okay,” I said, “now tell me about Nicky.”
“Don’t you ever relax, son?” my father asked. “I mean are you always on some case, some job? Don’t you ever just sit back and watch the TV or jerk off or something?”
Free from sorrow, I laughed and shook my head.
“You know, I killed my first man when I was fourteen,” I said for the first time ever in my life. “If anybody had found out and brought me to trial they would have probably called it self-defense but it was murder for me. I strangled him with my hands. I watched him die and then I burned his body with gasoline fire.
“You live a life like that and the Beverly Hillbillies jokes lose their appeal.”
I had never even imagined that my father’s face could hold compassion for anything except the worker and the Revolution.
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Clarence. I had to kill that man or he would have done it to me. You had to go off and fight your wars. I accept that now. Just don’t sit judgment on me. That’s all I ask.”
My father finished his snifter and I poured him another dram. He drank half of that before speaking again.
“Nikita didn’t start off as an armored car robber, as I’m sure you know,” he said. “He dealt with hijackers and smugglers for years before deciding to rob that one tank and then retire to Tahiti.”
“Do ants retire?” I said, quoting a question my father would ask the straw-man capitalist he so often imagined.
He grinned, showing me his white teeth.
“Nicky never learned his lessons as well as you, Trot,” he said. “Anyway, like I was saying, your brother had been involved with certain smugglers that from time to time intersected with other smugglers who from time to time intersected with so-called terrorists. For a modicum of information on these people, and the promise to reinvolve himself in their business, the feds erased Nikita from their system and freed him to steal, spy, and smuggle, incriminate, and enjoy freedom.”
“Nicky’s a snitch?”
“He likes to say that he’s a government agent but yes, he’s a snitch.”
“Damn. Damn.”
“We all cross the line on a daily basis, Trot. It only took me forty years to realize that.”
“And what about you, old man?” I said as I poured my fourth drink. I was beginning to feel the alcohol in my fingertips and my lips.
“What about me?”
“Why you stayed in the shadows while me and Nicky roved in the street?”
Tolstoy, who I would almost always from that moment on think of as Clarence, looked at me with apologetic eyes.
“In my years in the Revolution,” he said, “I, more than once, was implemental in damaging, destroying, and sometimes assassinating American military and corporate interests and their staffs. I’m on a very special top ten most-sought-after list.”
“Because of the people you killed,” I concluded.
“Because of the knowledge I have. If I was ever brought to trial the prosecution would be forced to reveal things that no American president, military general, or corporate CEO would like to have made public. I’m a threat and so I try to maintain a low profile.”
“Then why come back at all?”
“You and Nicky needed a guardian angel. I watched over you.”
I didn’t say anything to that. If we talked about him playing the role of father-from-the-shadows I might have rediscovered the anger that I had so recently given up. But I really didn’t care about what he thought he was doing or who he feared was after him. I had just solved the most important case of my career. I knew what had happened to me. I knew what he had done and why. So what if there was no pot of gold, no happy ending — truth is its own reward.