“He show some ID?”
“Yes, but it was just a business card. He offered me five hundred dollars and promised fifteen hundred more if I would call to orchestrate a meeting with you in the meeting room on the fifteenth floor. He said all I had to do was make the meeting time and he’d be there to serve the papers.”
“What did you do?”
“Took the money,” she said. “You know I have college expenses for my daughter. Then I told him that I’d call as soon as I got in touch with you.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“This is serious, honey,” the woman I loved said. “He wore gloves and a hat.”
Sitting there in my dark den, I got a little light-headed. That, as the old folks used to say, was the last straw. It was getting to be time for me to push back.
“Call Mr. Hollyman and tell him that you set up a ten-in-the-morning meeting with me. Tell him that he can pick up the key from Warren at the front desk anytime past nine. Tell Warren that I’ll get the key to the observation room at seven. And don’t you go to work at all. Stay home till I call and tell you that it’s okay.”
“LT?” Carson Kitteridge said at a few minutes after midnight.
“Did I wake you?”
“What do you need?”
“It’s not about Jones,” I said. “Not yet. But I got this other problem you might be interested in.”
There was a lull in the conversation, such as it was, for ten seconds or so. Carson was wondering if he should hang up on me. But we’d known each other too long for that. If I was calling then there was something happening that he should be aware of.
“What is it?” he asked.
I told him Aura’s story and we made half of a plan.
As a youth, sitting in the dark was always a relief to me. An adolescent roaming the streets of New York, I was often in trouble with the older boys and some men, too. I was a killer before my fifteenth birthday and for some years I’d have night terrors over the man I strangled. If I was very quiet under the cover of darkness this panic subsided, somewhat.
As a man I put away my guilty fears; I was, I told myself, prepared for anything, always prepared. I saw myself like my favorite mammal, the honey badger — a squat brute with exceptionally thick skin, powerful long claws, and always looking for trouble. The honey badger spends his days trampling through the world killing, digging up corpses, and defying even lions if he has to. He’s always in danger, and danger is always in him.
With these thoughts I got it in mind to turn on the lights and then, just as if God heard me, there was light.
“You goin’ to bed, Trot?” my father said from the door.
“Come on in, Clarence.”
Shrugging, he walked across the slender glove of a room to the stuffed chair set to the side of my desk.
“You got trouble, son?” he asked.
“Don’t you have a home?” I replied.
“Sure I do. I just thought you needed a little help around the house with Katrina just back and that thing with your office.”
“What is it with you and my wife, old man?”
“Is that what’s bothering you? You actually think I’d go after my own son’s wife?”
“She wants you like a tick craves blood.”
I realized then that my father’s face used to be rounder. This was why he looked like a stranger to me. He’d been a portly revolutionary but old age and a long list of failures had reduced him. His face was now long and oddly empathetic.
“Women are drawn to me, Trot. It’s because I’m always thinking about something else, something that seems like it might be more important than them to me. They want the love I feel for the Revolution or great literature. It’s hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.”
“They want you to want them,” I said. It felt as if I were a child again at my father’s feet.
“That’s it. A man feeling deeply about anything makes a woman want him to pay attention to her like that. When his passion is for something else she feels safe enough to look at it. And if you look long enough you want to try it out.”
“You know I hate you, right?” I said.
“I told you I’m not after your woman.”
“It’s not that, Clarence. You killed my mother. You promised me the world and then took it away. You save my wife and then tell me she yours if you want her but you don’t want her. I spent nearly half a century tryin’ to build back the engine of my life and here you come throwin’ a monkey wrench in the gears and ask, what did I do?”
To give him his due, my father didn’t try to argue or explain. He looked right at me, taking his medicine. I imagined that there were scars all over his body from South American torturers that didn’t hurt as much as the truth he was hearing.
“You want me to leave, son?”
“Not till this week is over,” I said. “Twill has to get out from under the mess he got into and it’s still a question whether or not I’ll survive till Monday. You stay a few days more and then you can get out of my life again.”
40
My father asleep in Dimitri’s room, Katrina next to me in the bed snoring so softly it sounded more like purring, and I never felt more alone in that home. I didn’t sleep at all. Even the darkness could not assuage my conflicted heart. There were three groups of killers after me or mine and three women I had feelings for. None of these people stayed in the right place or were likely to wait their turn.
I wanted to run away with Marella but that would end in tragedy, no doubt. I wanted to live happily ever after with Aura but my life was a Grimm not a grade-school fairy tale. Katrina and my father deserved each other but something in me wanted to tear them apart.
Those were the good things in my life.
Jones, Sidney-Gray, and Marella’s ex-fiancé were the slaughterhouse three; puppet masters vying for my demise with their marionettes lurching forward, wielding papier-mâché knives even as I lay in darkness.
Tomorrow, I thought, I’d turn the tables on my lovers, enemies, and blood. Tomorrow I’d begin my campaign to take back a life that other people, friend and foe alike, had gambled away.
Somewhere around 4:00 a.m. I realized that tomorrow had come.
I got out of bed, took my ice-cold shower, and shambled down the many flights to the street.
“Hey you, motherfucker... yeah you... come here!”
It wasn’t yet 5:00 and I was just passing Seventy-second and Broadway.
He was a big man, dusk-colored in the darkness of morning. Lumbering toward me he bellowed, “Stop right there!”
I had a neat.38 caliber revolver in my blue pocket but I didn’t think it would be called into service.
“Can I help you?” I asked when he came within nonshouting earshot. It occurred to me again that I had become a magnet for both love and trouble since boarding the train from Philly.
“Gimme twenty dollars,” he demanded.
“No problem,” I said. “It’s in my wallet. All you got to do is take it.”
“What?” It was both a question and a threat.
“You heard, man,” I said, getting as much derision in my voice as I could. “Even a dumb motherfucker like you understand plain English.”
His clothes, as well as his heritage, were various shades of brown. He was eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I, but my hands were bigger. I held up those mitts as I had done on a block not far from there just a few nights before. The last guy was a little smarter however.