I hadn’t told him that we were on serious business — he just knew.
Going down the West Side Highway, I explained about Zella and the complications that had arisen. He listened and nodded and drove.
We went through the tunnel at the bottom of Manhattan and made our way to the Gowanus Expressway, headed south.
“Why don’t you just leave well enough alone?” he asked when approaching the Belt Parkway.
“You mean leave Zella to rot in jail for something she didn’t do?”
“She shot her man.”
“They wouldn’t have been so harsh for that alone. I mean, she’d gone crazy.”
“It’s crazy to get her out of prison.”
“Yeah, but...”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. When I’m in bed early in the morning I wake up sometimes and think about the people I’ve wronged. Some of them, most of them, were pretty bad to begin with. I can live with that. But people like Zella... I mean, what good is life if you can’t stand up?”
“That’s what boxers do, right?”
“What?”
“They get knocked down and stand up again.”
“Yeah. If you’ve never been knocked down, then you’ve never been in a fight.”
25
The sun was gone when Hush parked on a side street five blocks from the address Luke Nye gave me. It was a square, flat-roofed pink stucco house not far from the ocean in a run-down but quiet part of Coney Island.
The doorway was inside a vestibule, so when no one answered our knock I used my tools to pick the lock and go in — we had already donned thin cotton gloves.
The first thing Hush did when we entered was to sniff the stale air.
“Huh,” he said.
It was a small, impersonal home. The living room had a couch, standing on short wooden legs, and a tan carpet made from cheap synthetic fiber. It could have been a motel room at the Jersey Shore — in 1957.
The bedroom had an unmade queen-sized bed, a dresser with three drawers, and a maple chair. There were various pants and shirts, shoes and socks strewn on the floor. Dust devils conferred in the corners, and I saw three small roaches rubbing antennae on the barred windowsill.
The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes in gray water. The roaches met in greater numbers there.
“Look,” Hush said.
At the end of the kitchen counter was a door with two or three plastic garbage bags stuffed into the crack at bottom.
“That’s where the smell is coming from,” Hush added.
“What smell?”
Instead of answering, the retired professional killer handed me a blue handkerchief he took from his back pocket. He had a yellow one for his mouth and nose.
When he yanked the door open it seemed as if the room was flooded with poison gas.
The roaches froze for a moment and then headed for the smell.
We did too.
Between the washer and dryer, tied to a kitchen chair, sat Durleth “Stumpy” Brown. His once pink skin was now gray and his flabby face had hardened into a mask. My eyes stung from the gases his body released.
With three fingers of his left hand Hush touched Stumpy’s forehead. Almost immediately a huge gutter roach shot out of the dead man’s right nostril. The creature hit the floor and scrambled out between my black shoes. It was then I became aware of the buzzing of flies.
“They tortured him,” Hush said.
“They’re torturing me.”
The killer laughed, he really laughed. It was a jovial, friendly guffaw.
I learned more about Hush in that moment than I ever wanted to know.
“Let’s get outta here,” I said.
“What did we come for?” he asked, turning to face me.
“What they already have.”
26
I got home at nearly midnight. The house felt empty, but maybe that was just me.
I went to the hall bathroom and got in the shower. Standing in the doorless stall, under the ice-cold spray, I shivered, and castigated myself for doing wrong even when I was trying to do right.
There was a cardinal rule in boxing: You can’t win if you don’t throw punches, but when you go on the offensive you have to accept the reality that you will most likely get hit. That’s why so many fighters are counterpunchers — they wait for their opponent to make the mistake.
I had taken the initiative; moved to get Zella’s conviction overturned. Shuddering from the cold, I knew that Stumpy and Bingo had been casualties of my ill-considered quest. Rather than helping, I made things worse — much worse.
“You remember when we used to take showers together?”
Katrina was one of the few people who could sneak up on me. I used to kid her that this stealth explained how she roped me into marriage — the joke wore thin in time.
She was wearing a black lace teddy under a yellow-and-black kimono. Her white skin was perfect, her eyes more engaging than I had seen them in years. She held a snifter in either hand, each loaded with a triple shot of cognac.
“Yeah,” I said. “You told me that you couldn’t take the cold.”
Katrina’s blond hair was piled up on her head rather carelessly. I knew she had been drinking because her slight Swedish accent became more pronounced when she was tipsy — tipsy, but not when she was full-out drunk.
I never understood this foreign inflection, seeing how she was born and raised in Middle America.
“I’m very delicate, Leonid.”
“Like white sharks and alabaster.”
“Like a voman.”
I stepped out of the shower and she handed me a plush red towel, leaning back against the sink as I rubbed and blotted the water from my body.
Katrina is a beautiful woman. Past fifty, she’d done everything to keep her body and face young. And though I’m not handsome I have the body of a fighter — hard and blunt. We both had something to look at, it’s just that we were no longer interested in looking.
She handed me a snifter.
If you can’t beat them, become them, my father once told me. That’s how the great cultures of the past ultimately tamed and therefore outlasted their conquerors.
There’s a small room on the street side of our apartment. Sometimes we call it the TV room, at others the little front room. There’s just enough space for the maroon sofa and the royal blue stuffed chair, facing an old console TV. Katrina led me there and sat next to me. She clinked my glass and we both drank — deeply.
“I vanted to talk vit you, Leonid.”
I sat back and away from her saying “talk.”
“Sit up,” she said and I obeyed.
I was wearing my blue suit pants and a T-shirt that was once white.
“Where are the kids?” I asked.
“Dimitri is vit his whore. Twill — who knows where he goes? He said he vas vorking for you. And Michelle is out somevair sucking on an old married man’s cock.”
Katrina and I were definitely man and wife. Maybe we were no longer in love but we knew how to get under each other’s skin.
“That’s something you know a lot about,” I said, wanting to attack my daughter’s attacker.
I downed the rest of the cognac and Katrina reached back behind the other side of the sofa, producing the new bottle. She poured me another drink.
“I vas looking for love,” she said, her blue diamond eyes staring into my brown ones.
To say I felt the stirrings of an erection would be a gross understatement. This biological reaction was shocking to me but not to Katrina. She looked down on the lengthwise tent of my trousers and shifted over, laying her left hand on it.