I was at the exit door on the first floor before I knew it. I meant to stop by the gym to tell Gordo what had transpired but, at the threshold of the street, I thought that there was really nothing to say. Either Elsa was going to leave or she wasn’t. When G went upstairs he’d find out for himself. I’d talked to her like he wanted me to but there was no telling what her decision would be.
I found myself walking east on Thirty-third. I was in trouble but it didn’t seem too bad. Rutgers would probably put some pressure on me but I knew how to push back.
The cell phone throbbed against my left thigh. I pulled it out and saw that it was Aura calling. I wanted to flip the phone open but my thumb refused. The vibrations ceased and the little green light of the display faded to black. It felt like watching something die.
I had stopped walking and stood there on the busy thoroughfare, feeling something close to grief over a missed phone call.
Then the screen lit up again.
It was Aura.
“Hello?” I said.
“Why didn’t you answer?” she asked.
I tried to find the words to lie but they evaded me.
“What’s goin’ on, babe?” I asked.
“I miss you calling me baby.”
It wasn’t just lies that escaped me, I couldn’t tell the truth either. I wanted to say how much I loved her, how that love had disappeared like it had with my father when he was being a soldier and not a husband. The feeling struck like an unconscious memory roaring into existence, necessarily unexpected and painful like plague boils erupting from glands deep in the neck.
“Um,” I said.
Aura laughed.
“Leonid?”
“Yeah... Yes, Aura.”
“I know that I’ve been stringing you along. It isn’t, hasn’t been fair, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was stuck. I love you so much but you scare me.”
A horn honked. For some reason that sound made me aware of a woman ranting almost incoherently on the corner a dozen yards away. People were hustling around, moving to the beat of their happenstance lives. This all seemed proper. Life was a cacophony, I’d always known it. Every once in a while there was a piece of beautiful music amid the dissonance, but lucidity was a danger in an irrational world — my father had taught me that too.
Aura made sense. She said that I frightened her.
“Leonid?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to talk?”
“... mothahfuckah try an’ tell me what to do,” the ranting woman cried, “but he don’t even have a appendix...”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I want to but I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you love me?”
“Like seaweed loves the sunlight,” I said in free-association mode.
“I love you.”
“... and the niggers was cowboys and all the white men were cryin’...”
“What can I do, Aura?” I asked.
“I want you back in my life.”
A deep silence set in on me. The people and traffic and crazy woman all stopped making their noises. My mind was like an ovum and her words the impregnating germ. Nothing else could get through. Nothing else mattered.
I forgot where I was going, fought off the desire to sit down on the curb. I wasn’t sure what I wanted; instead I had become something else, transformed by a desire I thought had died.
“Leonid.”
“Yes, Aura.”
“Did you hear me?”
I nodded.
“Leonid.”
“Yes, I heard you. I hear you.”
“Am I too late?”
“If you had asked me that first, I would have probably said yes.”
“Can we try again?”
“I need seventy-two hours to answer that question,” I said. I don’t know why. “Seventy-two hours and I will tell you what I can do.”
“You have seventy-one,” she said, bringing a smile to my face.
“I’ll call you at...” — I looked at my watch — “... four-seventeen three days from now.”
“I love you,” she said.
“Talk to you later.”
The phone rang once and he answered, “Kitteridge.”
“You called?” I asked.
“LT,” he said in way of greeting. “Good to hear from you.”
“What’s the problem, Captain?”
“There’s somebody I want you to talk to.”
“Who’s that?”
“There’s a short street over in Flatbush called Poindexter.”
“I know it.”
“Twenty-six is the address. All you have to say is Lethford.”
“And why am I going there?”
“Because you don’t want those kids of yours to be fatherless.”
I’d called Kit to snap me out of the daze that talking to Aura cast on me.
It worked.
“Somebody’s trying to kill me?” I asked.
“I believe that your name might be on a list somewhere.”
“What kind of sense does that make?”
“You think you’re so innocent that no one could ever mean you harm?”
“No. What I wonder is why would you care?”
“I’m a cop, LT. It’s my job to protect the welfare of even garbage like you.”
I disconnected the call. No reason to argue or protest. I was interested at the obvious anger that Kit was feeling. He rarely showed his feelings. I didn’t much either. That’s why we might have been friends in another life.
23
Though it was early evening the summer sun still shown down on Brooklyn. I reached the address on Poindexter a little after seven. What looked like a homeless man in gray clothes sat in the doorway of the boarded-up brownstone.
I say he looked like a homeless person because, even though he had the clothes and state of dishevelment down pat, he wasn’t doing anything; not sleeping or reading, drinking or eating, rifling endlessly through his belongings or engaged in an endless diatribe with some imaginary friend — or enemy. For that matter, he didn’t have any belongings — no backpack or grocery cart filled with the necessities and diversions that all humans (homeless or homed) need to survive.
I walked up to the doorway, where the tousled and unkempt black man lounged, and looked down at him.
“Wha?” he said, looking up with eyes both clear and unafraid.
He was in his thirties and fit underneath the loose garments. I could see what was probably the outline of a pistol in his right front pocket.
“Lethford,” I said.
His nostrils flared.
“Get the fuck outta here, main,” he replied.
“I don’t think Captain Kitteridge would like that.”
The pile of gray clothes rose up more like a panther than a broken man. He stared hard at me and then stepped aside.
The door seemed to be boarded, but all I had to do was push and it swung open.
The hallway was dark and narrow. At the far end a faint radiance hinted at but did not necessarily promise light. I walked in that direction, running my left hand against the wall. At the end I turned left, finding myself at the foot of what might have been a stairway.
Two silhouettes came from the sides of the barely visible steps. A bright light shone in my face, blinding me.
“Who are you?” a gruff voice demanded.
“McGill for Lethford.”
“What for?” the other man, who held the torch, said.
I reached out, pulled the heavy-duty flashlight from his hand, and threw it down on the floor.
“What the fuck?” one of them said.
Another light snapped on up above. I took a step backward so that the two shadow men could not grab me.