“They did,” he said.
“I once heard a student of Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan master, say that meditation is a gesture toward enlightenment, though that was a state of knowledge that we would never truly attain,” I said. “I think he meant that we’ll never be wholly in the real world. It’s like we’re shadows, invisible to most people. What we have to do is concentrate real hard just to be seen at all. And it’s that concentration that may one day normalize us, make us members of the group.”
“But what about our sins?” the ex-contract killer asked.
Sins?
My surprise at his word choice must have shown in my face because Hush said, “I know that what I’ve done is wrong, Leonid. I feel it every time I look at my son.”
I smiled. We turned left onto Broadway. When I looked up at the sky all I could see was darkness. The words came to me from a place I could rarely connect with.
“It’s a luxury to feel guilt, Hush. Little Thackery might sneak into the cupboard and take a cookie when his mother told him to leave them alone. Afterwards he feels guilty. That’s because he’s innocent and needs to confess because he was a bad boy but still able to be forgiven. That’s not us. There is no forgiveness for us. For people like you and me, guilt is an indulgence. It’s meaningless, like a platter of caviar served up on the front lines of a war. Our confession, our clemency, comes from doing what’s right.”
I wanted to say more but the tap shut off.
Hush stopped walking again.
The look in his eyes was angry and hurt, like a suitor who has just been snubbed.
I’m used to giving people bad news. Your wife and your best friend... Things like that. Some people get mad when they hear things they don’t want to believe. That’s all part of the job — but I wasn’t so blasé about the impact of my words walking north on dark Broadway with Hush.
He winced and I wondered.
He looked both ways and I wondered some more.
“I can’t say for sure but I think you’ve run across the path of a man named Bisbe,” he said and I realized that I’d been holding my breath.
“Bisbe?”
“I was the last word when it came to killing,” Hush continued, nodding. “Meat and potatoes. Never fancy unless I had to be. But if I had to be, I could kill a man with a hailstorm. But Bisbe’s crazy. You hire him to knock off a man with a bullet behind the head and BB’d kill him with a tooth infection or a suicide. Superstitious people say he’s some kind of mystic. I think he’s just a madman.”
“Are you sure?”
“That he’s a madman?”
“That he killed these women.”
“Nothing’s for sure,” Hush said, “but for a homeless man to hit that woman with a perfect killing blow and then to disappear in broad daylight... safe is better than sorry.”
33
As I explained the particulars of the case, Hush and I walked back to his door. He took two steps up and stopped when he realized that I was not coming with him.
“You want some coffee?” he offered.
“No, thanks. I need to be getting along, figuring out what to do next.”
“If you want my advice I’d say take a vacation. I hear Tokyo’s nice.”
Warnings, even from Hush, always brought a smirk to my lips.
“My client left six kids to fend for themselves.”
“She lied to you.”
“So? Why should she be any different?”
Hush winced. This was an expression of his concern.
“Thanks for the talk, LT. I’m not a lost cause, you know.”
“Say good night to Tam and Thackery.”
“We have to do this again soon,” he said.
I nodded and turned away, ruminating over the little scenes of my life. I was like a bug that had learned to live close to, maybe even inside of, fire, so that the predators would be scared away — going to hell to keep the bad men off my tail.
Thinking of bugs, I pulled out my cell phone and punched a few digits.
He answered on the second ring, “Hey, LT.”
“Bug.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You get an answer?”
“An envelope with a MetroCard wrapped in a small sheet of lined notepaper. I took it down to the subway on my evening power-walk and ran it through the machine they got down there to show the amount. It had forty-nine dollars and fifty cents on it. The card looked a little beat up. I figure Twill has a read-write stripe machine and he gets people to pick up discarded cards in the subways. He might even be tapped into the MTA computer system. He takes the money you transfer and gives back more than four times as much.”
“You sound impressed,” I said.
“I am. I mean, it’s a pretty simple scheme, but it took your son to implement it. He’s only a kid but he’s way ahead of everybody else.”
“I’ll call you back,” I said, breaking off the connection.
“Hello?”
“Twill?”
“Hey, Pop. What’s up?”
“Katrina there?”
“Mom went out with Dorrie to a movie.”
It was a phrase that might as well have been code for: She was out with a man who had a Y-shaped scar on his left buttock.
“You hear from D?” I asked.
Twill hesitated. That was good for my purposes.
“Come on, boy, I know that Tatyana called and Dimitri borrowed money from Bertrand.”
“That Bertrand’s a dog, Dad,” Twill replied.
“I was asking you about Dimitri.”
“He’s in France, man. Flew to Warsaw, met Taty at the airport, and then they both winged it down to Nice. He called me because he needed some more cash.”
“He came to you because of all your savings from that box-boy job at the supermarket?”
Twill went quiet.
“Where’d you get the money, Twill?”
“I thought you wanted to find out about D.”
“Where’d you get the money to send to your brother?”
“It was only a couple a hundred. I used the money I got from Uncle Gordo that time.”
“You’re going to be eighteen soon, son.”
“Uh-huh. I know.”
“They bust you again and I won’t be able to get you out of it.”
“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ to get busted for, LT. My hands are clean.”
“Don’t jerk me around, son.”
“No sir, not me.”
“Okay. The next time Dimitri calls tell him I need to hear from him. All right?”
“You got it.”
After we said our goodbyes and got off I called Bug again.
“Hey, LT.”
“Can you hack into Twill’s account?”
“Can a hot knife cut through butter?”
“Empty it,” I said, “every centavo. Put it somewhere safe.”
“Okay.” There was reluctance in Bug’s voice.
“One day you’ll have kids,” I said in response to the hacker’s tone, “and when you do you’ll understand.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “I’ll get on this right now.”
34
I was on Ninth Street near Third Avenue. The night was electric but empty. There wasn’t much traffic of foot or tire, and though I was standing still, my mind was breaking all the speed limits.
Hush was rarely wrong about contract killers. He knew his profession and I had the good sense to avoid a fight that I was bound to lose.
Twill’s business had to be shut down but it wasn’t just that. I had to somehow stop my favorite son from drifting into a life of corruption. There was no way that he could comprehend, in his youthful confidence, how the weight of his actions would pile on him, on his soul.
I was making progress but it was like having taken three strides into a five-hundred-yard-wide minefield. I could see the other side. I could imagine walking on ground that wouldn’t blow up under my feet. But first I had to take that next step, and then the one after that.