I didn’t like the notion of a smiling killer but there was no time to deal with that right then. I said my good-byes and turned to Paulie.
“Yeah?”
“My friend asked if I could send him a picture of you.”
“That piece’a shit phone has a camera?”
“One of the first.”
“Snap away,” I said.
He held up the phone for a moment and then turned it around to hit a few buttons. He sat there watching it as the outmoded technology organized and sent the picture, one pixel at a time.
After maybe three minutes he brought the phone to his ear and asked, “You get it?... Uh-huh... Uh-huh... Yeah, yeah, all right. Thanks, T.”
He put the phone away and looked at me like a man who had just been convicted and now waited for the sentence.
“You know,” he said after a moment or so, “I always felt like I was born in the wrong place and time. I mean the people here and everywhere don’t know shit about style or sophistication. My own wife went out and had an affair with some dude and then tells me that he made her feel like she never knew she could. He broke it off with her but she left me anyway. That don’t stop her from askin’ me for help whenever she needs it. There ain’t nuthin’ right about that. And my mother... My mother had this check-kiting scheme she used to use at banks in different cities. She’d hit town for a week and get fifteen, twenty thousand and then move on. Never saw two Mondays in the same town and never even got questioned, much less arrested. She refused to visit me in prison because she was humiliated that I got caught. Here I stole the money to pay for her goddamned nursing home and she wouldn’t even answer a letter. Shit. There I am in prison for her and she cut me off.
“You know my old man was no better. Strong motherfucker like you, only taller. Rob banks and armored cars. He said that he was ashamed to have a scrawny son like me. He run off from my mother because he said I was the issue of an affair...”
What surprised me was his proper use of the word “issue.” There was an education under that bony, sad-sack brow.
“Here I could’a made somethin’ of myself but everybody live in the modern world where nobody gives a shit about what’s right. And the worst place is prison. Motherfuckers up in there brag on all the crimes they did that no one ever tumbled to. Serial killers in jail for assault; arsonists put away for trespass. I don’t have no choice but to do what I do and to be what I am. Nobody does.”
“How did you meet Coco?” I asked to get the derailed scam artist back on my track.
“Her brother.”
“How you know him?”
“They busted him for smuggling drugs. He was my cellmate time before last. When his sister got in trouble he got in touch with me ’cause he knew I was just about to get out.”
“Why didn’t he help her?”
“Prison again,” Paulie said. “North Carolina. Here every motherfucker and his kid is hooked on pharmaceuticals and they put Timothy in for moving seventeen ounces of hashish. Seventeen! Shit. The best of us are the worst of us. We have lost our right to God.”
If I had only heard that one diatribe I would have known that Paulie was a jailbird. The odd mixture of philosophy, religion, and despair marked him as sure as a black man’s skin.
“One thing remains the same,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“You either eat or die.”
Paulie looked up at me then and a smile came unbidden to his lips. He was a scam artist who thrived on truth; no wonder he was so sad. He probably thought that his wife’s lover was better endowed than he; I was willing to wager that the one-night stand just knew how to laugh.
“What you want, McGill?”
“I want to talk to Coco. I want you to tell her that I know about the book and about the woman that wants it back. Tell her that I say that I can make it right for her and even get her a little scratch, you too.”
“How much?”
“More than twenty-five thousand for her and at least five for you if we get this business done. I’ll pay you nine hundred right now on good faith.”
“And you won’t, you won’t tell about me?”
“If you help me there’s no reason to.”
I reached in my jacket pocket and came out with a wad of hundreds.
Paulie jerked his head around and said, “Put it away, man. You can pay me outside.”
“Okay.”
“Look,” he said. “I don’t want no trouble with you. My friend T says that you’re serious business, that people have to be careful around you. So I’ma say that I’ll call Coco an’ ask her but if she says no there’s nuthin’ I could do.”
“What more can I ask for?” I asked.
39
It was nighttime in Greenwich Village. I went to a bar on Second Avenue, had three cognacs to toast my lost and long-dead lover Gert Longman, and then trundled down into the subway to make it back home.
My wife and father were sitting in the little front room again, drinking wine punch and telling each other things. She was laughing. There was color in her face. My father might have been blushing too but his skin was as dark as mine so the blood stayed hidden.
“Trot,” he said.
“Clarence,” I replied.
“Are you hungry, Leonid?” Katrina asked.
“Why?”
“I made chicken and dumplings the way you like them.”
Chicken and dumplings brought to mind a pop song from the ’60s about a cuckold who came home early.
My father and wife joined me in the dining room. They asked a few perfunctory questions about my day and then went back to talking to each other.
The food was great. To accompany the protein and starch, Katrina had made fried okra in a roux — a dish she liked to call half-gumbo. There also was an apple-cabbage slaw and peach cobbler for dessert.
I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He’d learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he’d read. When he was a young man he eschewed fiction, thinking that reality was all that mattered. But working at that wheel he had the time to remember the stories he’d read and somehow came to the realization that the novel was the only way a human being could truly express the lives he experienced.
“Lives, not life?” Katrina asked.
“If you live long enough,” Clarence explained, “you take on many personas. I’ve gone from sharecropper to revolutionary to scribbler in my seventy-nine years.”
“You seem so much younger,” my flirtatious wife chimed.
“I notice you didn’t mention ‘father’ in your list of personas,” I anteed.
I almost felt bad about the pain that wrenched Clarence’s face.
After the meal I looked at my phone and saw that there were fifteen texts and six calls. I wondered at that and then remembered that I’d turned off the sound to concentrate on Paulie.
In my office I listened to the voice mails first. That was easy because four of them were from Violet Henrys-DeGeorges-Trammel. She wanted that nine hundred dollars — badly. I thought that she’d probably get the money before the night was over; maybe even Paulie would get lucky.
Of the two other messages one was a hang-up and the other from Aura. Just hearing her voice set off a chill in my chest. It was a physical manifestation of love, just as the erections I’d experienced recently were from the lust Marella Herzog brought out in me.
“Leonid,” she said, “I need to talk to you right away.”
“Hello,” she answered, wide awake at 11:49.
“What’s up, A?”
There were no preliminaries, no “how are you doing.” Aura went right into the problem saying, “A man calling himself Abe Hollyman came to my office today and said that he was working for a lawyer who needed to serve a summons on you.”