“The kids read?”
“He has most of them go to school. That way they get smarter and hear stuff that might be some help.”
“Like burglary jobs?” I asked.
“Like that.”
“Let’s sit on that bench,” I said, pointing to a pedestrian stopping point near the Seventy-second Street subway station.
We perched and I put the fish under the concrete seat. And there we sat side by side, father and son with nary a gene in common. Both of us were under threat of mortal danger, but our demeanor was more like two women friends taking a break after an afternoon of window shopping.
“Regale me,” I said to my boy.
Twill shook his head slowly and did not smile.
“This dude Jones is the real thing,” he said. “He like the black plague and almost no one knows about it. He deals in underage prostitution, got a bigger burglary ring than I ever heard of, uses little kids and young women who pretend they’re the mothers for international smuggling, murders anyone who goes against him, and has underground public floggings for even if somebody steal somethin’ the wrong way. It’s like living in the Middle Ages here today in twenty-first-century New York.”
Somehow Mardi had gotten Twill to start reading. He used the knowledge he gained to further his understanding of the flaws of humankind.
“How many people work with him?” I asked.
“I only seen a dozen or so at one time but it’s got to be hundreds. He been doin’ it more than twenty-one, twenty-two years and the ones that grow up still do things his way. Fortune says that there’s at least two dozen dead in a graveyard below the tunnels.”
“What about the police?”
“Nobody seems worried about the law. Kids get grabbed sometime but Jones got a law firm called Bedford-Rule that gets them out. There’s a lotta talk among the kids, say that if somebody turns on Jones he’s not safe even on Rikers Island.”
“You believe that?”
“That man got a system, Pops. He got some serious people in his pocket.”
“And you couldn’t figure all that out before you got yourself this far in?”
“I just didn’t believe it, man,” Twill, my peer, railed. “I mean how you gonna have some crazy dude with a false beard only come out in the tunnels under the city and run a crime syndicate made mostly of children?
“When Liza come to me I figured that either Fortune was playin’ her or they were just believin’ some kinda hype. If he was scammin’ her I’d cut her loose and if he was for real I’d just move ’em out of harm’s way.
“Then, two days after Fortune brought me in, Jones sent us out on this one job where all we had to do was go to this warehouse in Long Island City. There was a young guy made night watchman two years ago. He’d been layin’ out plans to steal a truck that had more than a million dollars of electronics in it. We drove that suckah to an abandoned building over in Brooklyn where there was people waitin’ there to take it over and break it down.”
“What happened to the watchman?”
“Who knows? Vanished in the tunnels till Jones need him for another job.”
“Somebody broke into the office,” I said. “Used explosives on the front door and then broke down the wall to the back office. That sound like your man?”
“Naw,” Twill said through a sneer. “That’s too loud for him. Jones want everything to be quiet like.”
One shore achieved but there were still many rivers to cross.
“Why would they trust you on a job when you just got there?” I asked.
“The only weakness they have is that they don’t think they have no weakness,” my brilliant son opined. “Trouble is, they might be right.”
“Why didn’t you go to Carson?” I asked then.
“The way I see it, Jones got the uppity-ups by the nuts. You know your friend wouldn’t back down so I figured tellin’ him wouldn’t help my client and probably hurt him.”
“You think they might suspect that you’re a plant?” I asked.
“Why would they? I haven’t done nuthin’ except what they said. I did that one job okay. Today I gave out his letters. They don’t suspect me but Jones got these two lieutenants called Marcia and Deck, little younger’n me but serious as a land mine in a nursery school playground. I saw Jones gesture at Fortune with his eyes when Fortune was leavin’ a few days ago and Marcia walked out behind.”
“Fortune get you in?”
“Not really. He told me who to go to. It’s this newsstand near Grand Central. All you had to do was say you was lookin’ for a sales job and that was the way in.”
I stood up and Twill did too. He picked up the pink bucket and we were on our way north.
“Maybe you should get in touch with this Fortune kid and point him over to Hush.”
“A’ight,” Twill said with a nod. “You know I was thinkin’ that maybe we might need Hush on this one anyway.”
“Why?” It had only been recently that I’d read Twill in on my friend’s old profession.
“Jones don’t let anybody share the throne,” Twill said. “Cut off the head, you know.”
“We’re detectives, Twilliam, not contract killers.”
“A’ight.”
“So you think this Jones keeps his power by blackmail?”
“That’s the only thing makes sense, I mean if you got pictures of some council member or mayor’s aide havin’ sex with a twelve-year-old girl, that’s like gold.”
“You know where these records might be?”
“No idea whatsoever.”
27
Along the way to the apartment I picked up some chives and ice for my fish from a greengrocer. Once home I rinsed the two flounder and put them in the refrigerator while Twill changed clothes. Fifteen minutes after we got home we were off again.
Neither of us recognized the Filipino nun at the front desk of Tivoli Rest Home. When we came up on her she was staring off into space. She had a round face and golden skin. I didn’t know that woman from Eve, as I said, but I was willing to bet from that look in her eye that whatever it was she was thinking it had nothing to do with her Catholic vows.
“Katrina McGill,” I said and she jerked back to awareness. The face of wonder was replaced by one of atonement and loss.
“Sixth floor,” she said.
The only thing different about my wife’s room was that Katrina was not in it. She hadn’t been walking in the hall with Sister Agnes. Her bed was unmade so I thought that she might have gone to the toilet. Without discussing the mundane fact of her absence we decided to wait. I leaned against the windowsill and Twill arranged himself elegantly in the padded visitor’s chair. He was now dressed in black trousers made from light wool, a black silk T-shirt, and a pearl-gray jacket with no lapels or buttons.
“At least she’s walkin’ now,” Twill said after a minute or two. “That first six weeks I don’t think she got outta bed on her own at all.”
“You think she’s doing better then?” I asked my son.
“Better than at first but she kinda stalled the last month or so. I try to get her to walk with me but when I give her my hand all she wants to do is hold it.”
“I told her we could get a nurse at home but she wasn’t interested.”
“I think she wants to be the woman she was before all this,” Twill surmised.
Looking at my son I thought, not for the first time, that he was something like a creature, a baby puma or panther, that I’d found in the wild and brought home. There he slowly took on the form of a human child but his nature was still feral and unfathomable. He had deep feelings for his mother but these emotions were not nostalgic or self-indulgent. She was his mother and I was his father but the world was vast and we, all of us, were just a small part of that immensity.