I WAITED UNTIL I was back in my office to make any calls.
It was just after nine and the sun had been down for hours. Gazing out of my window at the Statue of Liberty's torch burning in the dark of the Hudson, I entered a number.
"Hello, Mr. McGill," the young man said in my ear.
"Tiny."
"How can I help you?" he asked.
This greeting was strange. Tiny "Bug" Bateman was at best monotone and at worst taciturn when I called him. The only reason he worked for me at all was because I had done his father a serious favor, and the one true connection the young whiz kid had to the outside world was his old man.
"There's a woman," I said. "Angelique Tara Lear…" I gave him her address, date of birth, place of employment, and school history. "What I'd like is any trace information you might be able to dig up. I'll pay you for this. It's for a client, and there are no favors involved."
"I don't want your money, Mr. McGill."
"Since when?"
"Um…"
Hesitation?
"You remember that girl you had call me last month on that burglary thing?" he asked.
Someone had stolen a client's grandmother's jewelry. There was some sentimental value attached. I had Zephyra Ximenez call Tiny to pass on my needs, as I was preoccupied with another case.
Zephyra might have been a working woman with a title and a business plan, but she was also beautiful enough to be a runway model in Europe.
"Yeah?" I said.
"I found my discussions with her, um, exhilarating."
"And?"
"I'd like a personal introduction."
"You live on the Internet," I said. "So does she. You know how to get in touch. What more can I do?"
Bug considered himself part of a historically based infrastructural movement that he called techno-Anarchism. The members of this (largely unconscious) movement he designated as monadic particulates. I could see why the young brown man might be attracted to Zephyra's mind-as well as the rest of her. Of course they hadn't met face-to-face, but I was sure that Bug had found a picture of her online.
"I just want you to put in a good word for me," the computer genius said.
"Listen, Tiny," I said. "You live in a cocoon in a basement in the West Village. She spends most of her time in a house in Queens. What's a word going to do?"
If there existed an Oxford Pictionary, its entry for "butterball" would have been Bug Bateman. He'd work up a good sweat walking a city block on a chilly autumnal afternoon. Even his hands were moist and pudgy. At twenty- nine, he sat in a chair surrounded by computers all day every day, and probably all night every night.
"You're refusing me?" There was actual pain in his voice.
"No. I'm just saying that I need you to work for a client of mine. I will pay your going rate on that and I'll do what I can for you about Zephyra-I'm just sayin' that you can't predict what a woman's gonna do."
"You'll talk to her?"
"Sure. Why not?"
While Tiny pondered the two-word question, I suspected that I'd just revealed to him a major flaw in his isolationist techno-philosophy.
"Um," he said. "I'll look up information on this woman."
My cell phone made the sound of the clang of a single bell. I had another question to ask Tiny but the incoming call was more important.
"I'll talk to Zephyra in the near future. Bye."
I hung up the office phone and answered the cell just as it was calling for the next round.
"Hey, Gordo," I said. "I was wondering if maybe you retired and moved down to Saint Lucia to live."
"Or die," he said in a voice that was even more strained and raspy than usual.
39
In the taxi ride downtown I drifted into a reverie about my parents: Tolstoy, the self-styled union organizer and radical Communist revolutionary, and Lena, the pious Harlemite who loved her man as much as any jazz lyricist could imagine. He went off to join a Cuban brigade down in South America soon after my twelfth birthday, leaving me fatherless, and virtually motherless, because Lena took to her bed and died soon after. She was the only proof I ever needed that a person could die from a broken heart.
That began my long and uneasy relationship with the various branches of New York City government-including the NYPD. I was continually running away from foster homes, getting into fights, and doing odd jobs for petty criminals. I was in and out of youth facilities. The foster parents I had weren't bad people. Many of them, I think, truly cared about me. But my father had trained me and my younger brother, Nikita, as revolutionaries from the time we could toddle. I hated Tolstoy, but at the same time he was my hero, and so there was little I had in common with the petit bourgeois churchgoers who tried to set me on the right path.
Then one day I stumbled into Gordo's Gym. He was only in his early forties then but he already looked old, craggy. He strapped some gloves on me and put me in the ring with an older, more experienced boy. I lost the round but never stopped coming forward, and so Gordo trained me, for seven years.
Maybe if I had paid closer attention to Gordo, if I would have let his hand guide me, I wouldn't have taken my homegrown revolutionary training and turned it into piecework for the mob. But I couldn't stay on boxing's bicycle-because there was no road, or even a path, that led to my destination.
THEY HAD HIM IN a southwest corner room with three other men on the eighth floor of St. Vincent's Hospital. He looked even smaller than usual in the big mechanical bed. His eyes were closed when I pulled up the chair.
Gordo's brown skin was tinged red from decades of blood rising to the surface as he exhorted his boys to give more. He was the color of rage, the man in your corner, win or lose.
"Leonid," he whispered.
He sat up a bit by shifting his knobby shoulders one way and then the other.
"Why you look so glum, boy?" he said. "I'm the one down for the count here."
I laughed, feeling a pang of guilt that my sick friend was comforting me.
"What they got you in here for, man?"
"First it was pre-ulcers, then it was plain ulcers, that went into bleedin' ulcers, and now they say I got cancer. An' I believe it, too, 'cause it hurt like a mothahfuckah."
"Stomach cancer?"
"A hole in one, boy. You could go up against Tiger Woods, with the right caddy."
"They gonna operate?"
"Not at first. They wanna nuke it an' then poison it and then if me an' it is still alive they might get the cut man."
"That's a bitch," I said.
"Body shot like you wouldn't believe." Gordo's wry smile turned sour.
"What do you need?"
"What's that lawyer's name you got?"
"Breland Lewis."
"I want you to get him to fill out some papers for me."
"Like what?"
"Augustine."
"Your nephew?"
"He's a good man but he don't have the sense of a termite. I wanna leave him the gym, it's all I got, but you know he'd mess it up in a week. Rack up some kinda fool debt, or maybe just sell the whole buildin' an' blow the money on his good-for-nuthin' kids or that money-hungry fourth wife'a his."
"You own the building?"
"What other landlord than me gonna let a sweaty ole gym don't make a nickel a day stay up there?"
I was astonished. It was a dilapidated old building but it was in the West Thirties, not three blocks from Penn Station. It had to be worth millions upon millions, even in the current real estate slump.
"So what do you want from Breland?" I asked.
"I want him to work out some kinda scheme to leave the place to you and then for you to take care of Augustine. You know, you get a li'l bit and then pass the rest off to him in parcels."
"Why you gonna trust me, G? You know my track record is not a good one."
"Shit. You think I don't know it? Man, if I could find somebody better they'd be sittin' here right now. But you know, boy, even though you about as crooked as one'a them curly bamboo plants, I figure even they grow toward the sun."