“Can I meet you tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe for breakfast?”
“Of course.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I’ll see you then,” she answered. “I really should be getting to sleep.”
I went back to bed, but sleep had settled in another room somewhere, down the hall with the children and the dying.
11
There’s a small diner on Forty-sixth just east of Fifth called Winston’s. It’s got a red linoleum counter and yellow tables along the plate-glass front. I didn’t need to tell Aura to meet me there — it was our place. When I arrived just shy of seven I could see through the window that she was already at our table, just being served her coffee.
I stopped at the entrance and allowed myself to be amazed yet again at how my heart began to pound when I saw her. From this sphere of wonder I proceeded to the booth.
We didn’t kiss hello.
I meant to say good morning but uttered “I love you” instead.
She reached out to touch my hand and I felt a thrill of excitement. “Me too.”
I sat, and the waitress, a strawberry blonde with pale skin and a ballerina’s body, took my order.
In contrast to the server, Aura was the color of glittering dark gold. Her hair was blond but wavy. She came by this coloring naturally, seeing as her mother was Danish and her father from Togo. Her pale eyes were no color that I could name.
Less than a year before I had almost died and she sat by me whenever my family wasn’t there. Twill kept tabs on the visits and called her when the coast was clear. Now and then the fever would abate and I’d slit my eyes to see her waiting for my recovery.
I blinked and found myself back in the diner with the woman who willed me back to life.
“You need to pay your rent,” she said.
“I got an advance yesterday.”
The moments passed.
Our breakfasts arrived. I had grits, pork patty sausage laced with sage, and four scrambled eggs. She had grapefruit, Special K, and skim milk.
“What did you want, Leonid?” she asked after the silence stretched halfway through the meal.
“I want you back.”
“How’s Gordo?”
“Dying. Doin’ pretty well at it, too.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Why? I’ll leave Katrina.”
“I know. And maybe if you’d done it earlier... No. It’s not your fault. It’s just that I, I’m afraid of losing you.”
“You won’t lose anything. I will be there.”
“When I saw you in that bed I knew that someday you’d die like that,” she said, “bloody and beaten.”
What could I say? I knew it, too.
“Yes, but we all die.”
“Not like that.”
“No,” I agreed. “Not like that.”
“I’ll leave the Tesla Building if you want,” she offered.
“They’ll just hire somebody else to throw me out.”
“How is everything?” the dancer-waitress asked. She was standing there, smiling hopefully.
“Fine,” Katrina said.
“I haven’t seen you guys lately,” the waitress added. “You been away?”
“Different schedules,” Aura said.
When the girl was gone I put down a twenty and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Aura asked.
“I have to leave. You’ll have the rent by three.”
12
The Art Deco wonder of New York, the Tesla Building, was eleven blocks from Winston’s, its elegant foyer replete with Italian marble and frescoes of monumental naked and toga-clad men and women. I had to smile as I walked past the security desk to the elevators.
It was no surprise to find Mardi sitting at her desk, studying her computer screen. She was the overachieving gal Friday of the movies from back before even I was born. Mardi was so concentrated that she didn’t stand up when I came in.
“You were right,” she said, not even looking up. “It’s her sister, Shawna Chambers-Campbell, divorced.”
There was a victory smile on her face when she shifted her gaze to me — but that faded.
“Ms. Ullman?” she said.
Mardi had been working for me less than a year and already she had become my closest confidante. The thirty-six years that separated us were nothing. I was a New York sewer rat and she a basket-case savant, raped for years by a man calling himself her father and then set adrift in a world that neither cared about nor comprehended her pain. Our unlikely alliance was, in its own way, perfect.
“I’m supposed to be the detective here,” I said.
“But you just look so sad.” Her eyes invaded mine with their compassion; the empathy of a girl made wise by psychic defenses a Soviet spy would have marveled at.
I pulled up her aqua visitor’s chair and said, “Teach.”
She gave me a wan smile — the doorway to acres of feeling I could only guess at.
“Her brother’s name is Theodore but everybody calls him Tally,” Mardi said. “He’s under arrest downtown. Her mother—”
“For what?” I asked. Shorthand was all we needed to communicate.
“Possession with the intent to distribute,” she said after hitting a few buttons on the keyboard. “Seven joints and an as yet undefined red capsule. Her mother is named Azure. She has a history of mental illness and is now a resident of the Schmidt Home in Battery Park City...”
You could see New Jersey out of Mardi’s window. From the seventy-second floor it looked like a scale model of Purgatory.
“What’s her problem?” I asked.
“Like that red capsule,” Mardi said, “undefined. The father’s name is Nathan. He lives in a retirement community, also downtown. He was a welder in the Merchant Marines for forty-six years. There’s no record of a divorce or separation.”
Mardi stopped reading the screen and looked up, allowing me to see in the deep well of her eyes that my sorrow was falling away.
“Shawna is a mystery,” she said.
“Go on.”
“At the age of sixteen she married Private First Class Richard Campbell. Three months later they divorced, citing irreconcilable differences. In the last seven years I could find records about three children she had but there might have been more.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Her sister wrote her a recommendation to an infant daycare center six months ago. None of the three children would have been that young, and it wasn’t an employment rec.”
“Got it.”
“Shawna’s last known address was a women’s shelter on Eighteenth Street. The last place she worked was Beatrice Hair Design on Flatbush in Brooklyn. But that was four years ago.
“Both sisters dropped out of high school. Tally too.”
I leaned forward, lacing my fingers and resting my elbows on Mardi’s desk.
Listening to the thumbnail sketches, I was aware of Aura slipping out of my consciousness like a small boat left untethered at the shore.
A man is defined by the work he does, my father told me over and over again. If he works for the corporation, then he is the corporation. If he works for the people, then he is the people.
Mardi was saying something about a small school in Rhode Island that Chrystal had attended. She’d gotten her GED and made it to college.
And don’t you go thinking that you’re unique, my father went on to say, time after time. That you have defined yourself. It’s the city that has made you. The streets and streetcars, the police and the bankers. You aren’t anything more than an ant to them, and they are the kings and queens, tunnels and mounds that keep you from what you could be. They have made you into a hive dweller.
“Mr. McGill?” Mardi was asking.