“Not me,” Thackery said bravely. “I wouldn’t ever hurt myself fallin’ out of a tree, huh, Mama?”
“Not as long as your father or I am there to catch you,” Tamara Cunningham, Thackery’s best teacher, said.
“And Uncle L,” the boy said. “Uncle L would catch me, too.” It wasn’t a question.
We had a very enjoyable meal. Every now and then Thackery would get loud or fidgety but all Tamara had to do was reach over to touch him and the nervous energy would drain away.
Hush told stories about a brave knight who wore black armor and a beautiful princess who loved him. The princess was kidnapped and the knight’s best friend saved her and then the knight saved the best friend and they all lived in a big pink palace where the full moon shone every night and the days were all sunny.
It was another side of the assassin, a side that only the people in that room ever saw.
It gave me the feeling of being singled out — like an elk in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle.
After a serving of strawberry rhubarb pie and ginger ice cream Hush said, “It’s time for bed, young man.”
Thackery’s eyes showed his disappointment, but he got up to kiss his mother and then me.
“Good night,” he said and Hush led him off to bed.
When they were gone Tamara made to rise, saying, “I’ll get you some more coffee.”
I held out a hand, not quite reaching her.
“I don’t need it,” I said, and she sat back down.
We were silent a moment. She liked me. I was that knight’s friend. I had saved her life, and Thackery’s, too.
“Timothy loves you,” she said after a deliciously enjoyable period of quiet.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell him that.”
She laughed and said, “You’re the closest thing he has to family outside of us.”
“How are you doing, Tam?”
“I love my husband and son,” she said. “They are everything to me. But... but I’d like to have something for myself. Maybe I could take classes or something. It’s only that Timothy worries so much. Whenever I’m gone he thinks the worst. Once I went to visit my brother in Florida and when I came back he was a wreck.”
I remembered that long weekend. It was the only time that I had ever seen Hush drink alcohol.
“Tell him what you need, honey,” I said. “He’ll just have to figure out how to deal with it. And I’ll find you a babysitter, one that’ll meet his high standards.”
Tamara smiled. She and I were on the same page for reasons completely opaque to me.
Hush walked back into the room then.
“He wants you to come up and tell him a story,” he said to his wife.
“Okay,” she said. “Will you still be here when I finish, Leonid?”
“You bet.”
When she was gone Hush went back to his chair.
“She likes having you here,” he said.
“You wanna go take a walk with me?”
He knew what my words meant. I could see the funeral lights going up behind his eyes.
32
On the street we looked like any two working-class stiffs at the end of a too-long day. Hush wore a brown jacket over his tan shirt and I was in an iteration of the blue suit that was my uniform.
“How many of those suits do you own?” Hush asked as we walked along the pathway beside NYU’s monolithic library.
“Four now,” I said. “It used to be only three but I bought one to keep in the office in case Katrina puts the other three in the cleaners at the same time.”
That was a lot of meaningless chatter for us and so we strolled along in silence for a few blocks.
When we were waiting for the light at Houston Street it was my turn to speak.
“Two women,” I began. “Allondra North and Pinky Todd. The first was lost at sea, fell from a yacht off the Florida coast. The second was killed by a homeless man on Fifth Avenue. He hit her in the head with a stone and then escaped in broad daylight.”
“I remember that,” Hush said as the light turned green. “The guy just ran up behind her and whacked her where the skull meets the spine.”
My heart tittered. It wasn’t a real laugh but an inner revelation of anxiety. That was when I explained that both women were purported to be having problems with the same man — their husband.
“The woman who told me all this,” I said, “was just pretending to be his wife. She was murdered in front of her children not two days ago.”
We were walking in the touristy part of SoHo then. At one time this was a neighborhood of warehouses and small Italian shops, but now there were restaurants and hotels, and street vendors selling everything from big silver rings to paintings of naked women with fat bottoms.
Hush had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the sidewalk until we passed Spring, headed south for Canal. Then he looked up at me.
Lower SoHo was dark and silent at that time of evening. It was a place where a man like Hush could speak freely.
“You remember what you said to me on this street five months ago?” he asked.
I nodded, admitting to the shadows that I did.
It had been a lesson that my sometimes anarchist, sometimes Communist, but always revolutionary father had drilled into me and my younger brother when I was nine and Nikita was seven.
Some people live outside the sphere of Law and Man, dear old dad used to say. They see something off the road or follow after a tune that no one else can hear. This solitary event leads them on a journey that could be taken by no other. They’re gone for years from their families and the world. They have fantastic adventures and battle for the freedom of all men.
Then one day the same flash or color or song that led them away from everything and everybody leads them back into a life where they don’t belong. All of a sudden there are rules and customs that, if you touch any part of them, will hold you, trapped.
Tolstoy McGill meant this as a warning for the true radical or militant. You were never to abandon your goal — not even for love.
It occurred to me one day that my father’s cockeyed warning contained so much truth that Hush might see it as a positive illumination of his transition from murderer to family man rather than a signpost cautioning him to turn back into the darker ways.
“How did you do it, LT?” Hush asked.
He stopped walking, so I did, too. Two women who were a dozen paces behind us crossed the street almost as if that was their plan all along.
I smiled at the innate intelligence of the young women in short dresses and bright colored heels. That smirk was also in recognition (for at least the hundredth time) that Hush, possibly the most dangerous individual man in the world, considered me his peer and maybe even an example of the way a man was supposed to live his life.
“You still going to that Buddhist monastery?” I asked.
Hush shook his head and then we were walking again.
“Now that Tamara and Thackery are here I like to spend the time with them. It was either the job or the retreat.”
Hush drove a limo for an upscale New York service. I never understood why. He was a millionaire many times over but he worked four days a week driving around people who would have run screaming if they had any idea who he was.
“But you still meditate, right?”
“Yeah. I do an hour or so in the morning, and sometimes, when things get cold in my head, I hit it at night, too.”
“When you were at the monastery they talked about enlightenment sometimes.”
We were crossing Canal. The street vendors were closed by then and it was pretty empty. Hush and I turned left, walking over toward Broadway.