He led me past a huge refrigeration unit into a big kitchen where other brown-skinned, straight-haired men were preparing the breads and pastries for a wall of ovens. From there we went into a small hallway lined with lockers. This hallway ended at his office door.
He sat behind the desk. I sat on top of it.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked.
“I’m not going to pay that detective,” he said.
“I don’t know why not. He didn’t give up your name.”
“He didn’t?”
“The minute I saw those pictures I knew you paid for them.”
“How?”
“Because you been wettin’ yo’ beak in Katrina’s fountain for six months and more,” I said. “You went to Atlantic City together in March and then turned around the next month and met her in Chicago when she lied and said that she was at a family reunion.”
“You knew?”
“Listen, kid, when you meet a woman willin’ to betray one man to be with you, then you can bet dollars to doughnuts that she will do the same goddamned thing to you.”
“If you knew, then why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you do something?”
I took out my .41 magnum and placed it on the desk between us.
Bertrand was transfixed by the weapon.
“Is this what you want?” I asked him.
All the love and betrayal and jealousy flowed away in the face of that ugly black gun.
“No,” Bertrand said clearly, without a falter or hesitation.
“If you do one more thing to try an’ mess with my wife I will be back. Do you understand me?”
“You’re, you’re here to protect her?”
“She ain’t much, I’ll give you that, but she’s Dimitri’s mother, and I will not stand for you to try and bring her down.”
“But she was with me,” the baker said, “for months. Aren’t you mad about that? Aren’t you angry about D’Walle?”
“There’s only two things I need to know,” I said.
“What?”
“Did Dimitri know about you and his mother?”
“No. He’s been distracted ever since he met Tatyana.”
“Do you know where Dimitri is?”
“He borrowed some money from me and flew to Paris. He said that Tatyana was going to meet him there.”
“Then there’s nuthin’ else between you and me, Bert,” I said. “But if you do anything else to mess with Katrina, if you just go yell at her in my house, I will destroy you — completely.”
I let those words hang in the air a moment and then retrieved my pistol.
30
Back out on Bleecker Street — with its tourist shops and old-time Italian specialty markets, its storefront fortune-tellers and overpriced clothes designers — I wondered about time and the people who wasted it. Almost every hour of every day was a wasteland of TVs, radios, lying newspapers, and people like Bertrand Arnold railing against his predestined fate. It wouldn’t matter so much if the malingerers of the world didn’t want to drag me into their ditherings. What did I care about the newest reality show about truckers or bail bondsmen? What did it matter to me if a cow in New Zealand gave birth to the world’s first three-headed calf or who my wife cuckolded me with?
Why would a man having an affair with someone’s wife reveal her infidelity to him? Could revenge heal his broken heart or mend Katrina’s errant ways? If I shot D’Walle, whoever he was, would Bertrand have gotten what he wanted?
It was like blasting a cloud of butterflies with a shotgun because you were earthbound and jealous — it made no sense and was a waste of the little time we had to make sense in.
Thinking these thoughts, feeling the weight of the pistol in my jacket pocket, I found that I had walked across town to Broadway and was on my way north. My thoughts were fragmented and weightless. It was the state of mind a boxer is put in by a solid right hand to the side of his head. Things are a-jumble but he knows that there’s one important fact that needs immediate attention. Maybe there was a three-headed calf somewhere, but that knowledge won’t help the situation.
Keep your gloves up, Gordo shouted at every arrogant young boxer who thought he was too fast, too slick to get hit. But even the thought of Gordo sent me veering off course. The man who took the place of my father... dying in the same room where I had planned the demolition of many an innocent, and not so innocent, life.
This last thought arrived with me at the front door of Aura Ullman’s apartment building. Instinct and a sense of duty had brought me there. The children were my clients now and their mother’s death was my job.
“Yes?” came the answer to my ring.
“Aura?”
“Leonid,” she said as the buzzer sounded.
She was at the open door when I got there, the sun flooding into the hallway from behind her. She smiled and held out both hands to me. I took them, pulled ever so slightly, and felt her ambivalent resistance.
“Come in,” she said.
The living room was a mess. Children’s clothes and toys, coloring books and storybooks strewn here and there. There were smudges on the TV screen and a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a paper plate set on a chair that belonged in the dining room.
Aura smiled and I learned something about her: she loved the disarray of children.
“I had to buy clothes for all of them,” she said proudly. “They said that you took them away without time to pack.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
She smiled and gestured toward the wall-sized window that looked down on the private park.
In a small clearing Theda and Fatima were leading the brood in a lopsided circle dance. Theda held the littlest boy, Uriah, and Boaz carried his smallest sister. They were laughing and singing.
Aura smiled down on them.
“Thank you, Leonid,” she said.
“I love you,” I replied.
“Let’s sit down.”
I sat in a blue cushioned chair and she on the off-white sofa that had suffered some stains in the last twenty-four hours.
Noticing me notice the spots, she said, “I can get the furniture reupholstered after you’ve found their aunt.”
I wanted to ask her what she’d found out from Fatima and her little clan but there was a question on the table.
“There’s no time for us, Leonid,” she said.
“I can make time.”
“No,” she said, “you can’t. You’ve got too much to do, too many irons in the fire.”
“We could leave New York. I’d do that for you.”
“I can’t allow myself to go there,” she said. “Please... be my friend for the time being.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe forever.”
I had killed men with my bare hands, taken enough punishment to have died many times over myself. I had enemies and a special policeman assigned to bring me down and send me to prison. There were people suffering at that very moment because I had framed them. And yet there I was — a teenager with a gaping heart.
I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, remembering what was important and why I was there.
“Have the children told you anything?” I asked.
“Only that they want to go live with their Aunt Chris in a house on top of a big building.”
“Did they talk about what happened to their mother?”
“I think she was murdered, Leonid.”
I didn’t want to say what I knew right then. She loved having those children in her house and there didn’t seem to be any reason to corroborate her fearful empathy.