She, Aura, took her mother’s maiden name and came with her to New York when she was fifteen. She majored in business at CCNY and took over Terry Swain’s job when he went into the hot dog business.
“You’re seventeen days late on the rent,” she said when I reached her.
I pulled out a keychain that held the seven keys I needed to open the locks that secured the outer chamber of my inner sanctum.
Hyman and Schultz had figured out that I was the likely cause of their problems, but they didn’t have proof. So when they hired Aura they told her that her top priority was breaking my lease.
size="3">“The landlords want their money,” Aura said. Her voice was also golden—sexy with an added vibration that sent chills down into my shoulder blades.
I had opened three locks.
“I will start eviction proceedings tomorrow if I don’t have the rent by tonight.”
Five locks.
“You know that your lease is a crime, Mr. McGill.”
So’s that black dress you’re wrapped in, I thought.
Seven locks and the door came open.
When we walked in, the lights came on automatically. A tripped switch turned on three silent cameras that took digital pictures every eight seconds. The cameras were installed on a rare site-call by Tiny “Bug” Bateman himself, and so they were foolproof. I would look at the pictures of Aura later, after she’d finished threatening me and went back to her own office.
I leaned against the receptionist’s desk while Aura shone her stern visage down on me.
“I got a job I’m just finishing up right now,” I said. “I can pay you by tomorrow night.”
She appraised my words with her stormy, sky-colored eyes and smirked. Then she shook her head.
“My number-one job is to get you out of here.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” I asked, standing up straight.
Aura was three inches taller than I but it seemed like a foot. She pulled her head back and sneered, shaking her head ever so slightly.
“Come on,” I said. “Just one day. You know that you can’t evict me if I pay by tomorrow anyway. It’ll just be a lot of paperwork.”
“The owners would like to see it.”
“One day.”
“One day,” she said, “for one kiss.”
It was astonishing to me that something so sweet could hurt so bad. Holding that woman in my arms, I ached for a whole other life, a life that I would never have. When she pressed her shoulder against mine I moaned as much from the pleasure as from the ache.
I pulled away, trying to remember how to breathe.
Her gaze was triumphant.
“I could tell you liked that, Leonid Trotter McGill.”
I hadn’t caught my breath yetv hmy brea.
“You don’t love her,” Aura said. “She’s done you dirt again and again. Why would you stay there when it’s obvious where you want to be?”
“Georg and Simon would fire you if they thought we were together,” I said lamely.
“I can always get another job.”
“I’ll have your money before six o’clock day after tomorrow.”
“I only gave you one day.”
I went to the door, opened it, and looked down at her feet.
Ê€„
4
After Aura had gone I sat down in the receptionist’s chair and put my feet up on her ash desk. I didn’t have a receptionist but it was important to keep up appearances. I might become successful one day and need someone to greet my long line of wealthy clients.
Sitting there, gazing out the window at New Jersey, I wanted nothing more than to have Aura in my life. I wanted her to be my woman in a world where I was an upstanding and respectable citizen with a receptionist who only allowed honest civilians like myself past the front office.
These bouts of fantasy were always bittersweet because thoughts of what I didn’t have always brought me back to the chain around my neck—my wife, Katrina.
“I’M GOING TO leave you, Leonid,” Katrina had said to me one evening eleven months before. We were sitting in the dining room of our West Side apartment, alone.
I looked at her, trying to decipher the meaning of her words.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
Some months earlier Katrina joined a gym, had a surgical procedure that transformed her face from middle-age sag into something quite lovely. I had hardly noticed but by an act of supreme will Katrina had regained much of her youthful beauty.
“I’ve met someone,” she’d said, wanting to keep the conversation going. “His name is Andre Zool.”
“Uh-huh,” I managed to say.
“He’s an investment banker and he loves me.”
“I see,” I said but Katrina heard something different, a complaint.
“You haven’t slept in our bed more than two nights in a row in half a year,” she condemned.
“I’ve been sleeping in the office. I’ve been . . . been thinking.”
“I need a real man in my life. Not a zombie.”
“When are you going?” I asked, wondering about the silence in our seven rooms.
“There’s no use in arguing,” she said.
“I’m not arguing. I’m asking you when you’re leaving.”
“Dimitri is going to stay with Andre and me until he finds a dormitory,” Katrina said, having a conversation in another dimension, with a different Leonid. “Shelly and Twill both want to stay with you.”
“But I had blood tests done,” I said from my separate reality. “Dimitri is the only one that’s mine.”
Katrina, in all her Nordic beauty and savagery, stood up from the table, knocking her chair to the walnut floor.
“You bastard!” she said and then stormed out of our apartment.
That was on a Wednesday, too. For six months I had been brooding over the corruption of my life. Katrina leaving meant nothing to me. We hadn’t loved each other for a very long time. We hadn’t ever lived in the same world.
On Monday Terry Swain announced his early retirement.
On Friday Aura Ullman put me on notice for Hyman and Schultz.
By Sunday Aura and I were lovers and I had decided that the only thing I could do was try to make right what I had done wrong. At night Aura and I slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I begged her to come live with me but she had an adolescent daughter and thought that we should give it some time.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER the real estate market crashed.
Andre Zool had been instrumental in getting his company to buy up fourteen percent of Arizona’s recent mortgage debt—and there was some question of kickbacks. He lost over a billion dollars. Zool got on a plane bound for Argentina, where his family had migrated after World War II.
The next morning I came home from work to find Katrina in our living room with our dour son Dimitri at her side.
“Forgive me,” were her only words.
If she had said anything else, anything, I would have been able to send her away: I would have been able to go off with Aura to start a new life.
MY PRIVATE CELL PHONE, the legal one, rang. Actually it made the sound of a growling bear, the special tone I had given to anyone whose phone number came through as private.
“Mr. McGill?” he said. “Ambrose Thurman here. I tried yo" we. I trur office phone but got no answer.”
“Mr. Thurman. I was just about to call you.”
“With good news, I hope,” the fop detective said.
“Yes, very good news. I have located three of the four men you’re looking for.”
“What are their real names and addresses?” he said, his voice brimming with formality.
“There’s a question of remuneration.”
“A question of what?”
“You know what I’m saying—I need my money first.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Yes—remuneration,” he said, repeating the word carefully. “I will have to have all four names before I can pay you.”
“Well, then I’ll call you later.”
I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and sat back in the phantom’s chair.
There was something odd about Ambrose. He was an Albany detective working for an upstate client. This client wanted definitive information on all four subjects before he would pay.
I decided that I’d need more information before handing over what I had to the persnickety, overly formal Albanyite.
But I appreciated his call. Moping over lost love, a loveless relationship, and other things was no good. It tended to give me bad dreams.
In order to keep the momentum toward a healthier state of mind, I entered the code on the electronic lock that allowed entrance to my interior offices. Once I was ensconced behind my ebony desk, looking down over lower Manhattan, I logged onto a specially constructed computer using the ID [email protected] This allowed me secret entrée to my favorite son’s personal domain.
Once a week or so, as a rule, I perused Twill’s personal e-mails. I did this because Twill, for all his superior qualities, was a natural-born criminal. He didn’t hurt people physically but he was a whiz at getting in and out of locked rooms, performing Internet scams on children of his age, and putting A in touch with B to garner C. He had at least seventeen separate e-mail addresses, all of which were forwarded to [email protected] He had to have a pretty good hacker who helped him with all this, but I had Tiny “Bug” Bateman, and Tiny, by his own estimation, was the best in the world. Tiny had set me up so that by using the double dollar sign and the word “hunter” I could shadow Twill’s every communication.
Most of the handsome teenager’s e-mails were innocuous enough: young men talking about sports and girls, girls offering to do things that most of the children of my generation never even imagined, and minor criminal activities that I ignored because I had my shadow on Twill to rein him in if things started going seriously wrd o seriouong.
The bear growled in my jacket pocket but I ignored it. If it was Thurman again he could cool his heels wondering if I was going to let him walk all over me. If it was someone else they could leave a message, because for the past few days my son had been getting some worrisome communications on his private address.
Someone, a teenage girl calling herself “M,” had been sending Twill distressed and depressed messages. She’d even mentioned suicide. Twill was very good with her. He told her that she was a good person in bad circumstances and that he would be there for her anytime she needed. They never discussed the exact nature of her troubles but it had something to do with her family.
The problem was that Twill was more like a man than a sixteen-year-old boy and was apt to take on more than he could accomplish. So I had been signing on as his shadow once a day for the past week.
There was a message from M and a reply that day.
Hey T, Thanks for your note. I really appreciate it but things are getting worse around here. Much worse. I really do think it would be better if I stopped him myself. I know that you have connections with people and if you could just give me a name of somebody who could sell me a gun that’s all I need. Please do this for me. I have to do something.
M
If that wasn’t bad enough, Twill had an answer that set my teeth on edge.
M. I hear you girl. But you can’t do something like that. You’ll probably just hurt yourself. The street fair is just two weeks from this Saturday. You hold on till then and I’ll take care of it for you. No one will know.
T
One of the many good qualities Twill had was that he never made idle promises. If he said he’d do something, he always tried his best. And I was absolutely sure that his best in this case was the death of someone. I had more than two weeks to defuse the situation. Looking on the good side—at least it gave me something positive to do.
Ê€„
5
Gazing at the gap in the skyline left by the World Trade Center, I thought about Twill. Not of my blood, he was tall and lithe, handsome and quick to smile. The only thing we had somewhat in common was our dark coloring but even there our skins were different hues. I had more brown to my blackness.
But blood relations are overrated. Twill had a way of making you feel good. His greeting—morning or night, being picked up at the police station or after a schoill„ol function—was always friendly and sincere. His head was cool and his heart warm. Twilliam was one of the finest people I had ever met. And so it was my self-appointed duty to make sure that he wasn’t pulled down in the wake of his own superiority.
A solitary seagull cried. That was the sound I had Tiny program into the stolen cell phone he sold me.
“Hello?”
“Who the hell is this?” an angry voice demanded.
“You called me, young man,” I said trying to sound pleasant.
“Are you Arnold DuBois?” he asked, pronouncing the last name in French fashion.
“Du Boys,” I said, correcting him on the pronunciation of my alias.
“Why are you trying to get in touch with me, Mr. Du Boys?” Roger said, maybe hearing some of the iron in my jaw and moderating his tone appropriately.
“Are you the Roger Brown that they used to call B-Brain back in the day?”
“Who are you, man?”
“My real name is Ambrose Thurman,” I said. “I’m a private detective. And I have been retained to get in touch with you.”
Three tiny blips sounded and I knew that Roger had hung up on me. It didn’t matter. I had a hook into him now.
WHEN AMBROSE THURMAN came to me all he had was a short list of street names—Jumper, B-Brain, Big Jim, and Toolie—along with a few descriptive details. The last time his client had seen them they were kids, not much older than Twill. He needed their real names and current whereabouts. They all had had records as juvenile offenders but the bureaucracy of New York’s judicial system wouldn’t allow him to invade the privacy of minors.
