“I used to kiss yours,” she said. “I used to cry out for you.”
Her grip tightened and I thought about pushing the hand away. Instead I took another drink.
Katrina started moving her hand up toward my belly button and then down again.
“Do you vant to come like this?” she whispered. “Like a teenage boy on a date with some fast girl.”
“Ummmmmm.”
“Or do you vant me to show you what I have done with my lovers? Do you vant me to take you right here on this couch?” Her voice was getting stronger. “Do you vant to get on your knees and suck the pussy?”
“What...?” I said.
“Vat did you say?” she asked me. She leaned over and gave me a wet kiss.
“What did you do?” I asked. “With them.”
I already knew. One of her old boyfriends had hired a detective to take pictures of her with the new man. The jilted lover sent the photos to me, expecting that I would exact retribution. He miscalculated. I threatened him and put the pictures in my safe.
But hearing her tell me was better than any pictures. Having her position me and encourage my manhood was exactly what I needed right then.
I don’t think that Katrina was trying to help me. She was just angry at life and getting back at the world by seducing me. It made no sense but I wasn’t really thinking... “Shouldn’t I use a condom?” I remember asking at some point.
“I don’t need it anymore,” she said into my ear.
In the morning I woke to find the empty fifth of cognac on the night table next to our bed. Naked, Katrina was on her back, half out from under the covers, and snoring. The erection from the night before reappeared but I was sober enough to ignore it this time.
I lurched from the bed and went down the hall, holding a towel around my waist in case one of our kids had come in during the night.
Another cold shower and I was out the door and down to the street. I felt like a young man with a hangover. My dick was waiting for any excuse, as my mind wandered from here to there with no direction, no reason.
I stopped at a greasy spoon on Seventy-first Street and ordered fried pork chops with an American cheese and garlic omelet. That, with home fries, white toast, and grape jelly, put enough poison in my system to slow down the rampaging hormones awakened by a woman who I now understood was overwhelmed by her change of life.
27
I do my best thinking while walking, but sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off with the blinders of an office cubicle around me, facing a monitor with solitaire on it; the only thing on my mind would be the next card to play and if the boss might be walking by.
I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. My emotion was more an uneasiness about having sex with my wife because my ex-girlfriend had asked me to come back. This conundrum seemed petty, childish even.
But I knew the perturbation over the drunken sex orgy with my wife was really just a blind for the murders I’d caused. Stumpy Brown, Bingo Haman, and there might have been more; certainly more was coming.
Walking down Tenth Avenue with artists, businessmen and — women, and the homeless, I tried to imagine that desk job. If the worst thing that happened in my life was getting fired because I was a slacker and replaced by a better-educated Hindu from Mumbai, if that was the cruelest event, then I’d feel that I was blessed.
But instead I was godless, blindfolded, and in line for execution by parties unknown. I did the right thing and got the wrong outcome. I could have been a lyric in the Dr. John song.
My cell phone throbbed somewhere between Thirtieth and Twenty-ninth.
“Boss?” Zephyra said.
“Yeah.”
“What’s up today?”
“Not much.”
“I can see from the GPS of your cell phone that you’re headed south. Are you going to see Charles?”
I had to remember to have my tracker disconnected.
“Yeah,” I said. “Anything you want me to tell him?”
“No. Just hi.”
I walked pretty fast, making it down to the intersection of Charles and Hudson Streets in the West Village before nine. A quarter of a block east and seven granite steps down was a shamrock green steel-reinforced door that could stymie a SWAT team or a platoon of advancing Russian militia.
All I had to do was stand in front of that door because a blank white card in my wallet sent out a pulse that made the denizen of the underground bunker aware of my presence.
Thirty seconds after I got there a voice said, “Come on in, LT.”
I pressed the door and it opened. I walked through and the mostly steel portal slammed behind.
Everything seemed as it always had; room after room filled with electronic devices used for intelligence gathering, flat-out spying, and, now and then, triggers for more aggressive acts.
Three chambers down I came to a cavernous space that was once the master bedroom of the subterranean apartment. Now the room was lined with computers and air conditioners. In the very center of these frigid electronics was a round Formica tabletop with a man-sized hole cut in the middle. Twelve plasma and LCD screens encircled this desk. These monitors flowed with images, texts, and less definable waves of color.
Sitting in the hole was a caramel-colored young Adonis. On top of his head were glasses with one blue and one red lens. These I knew he used to see images represented by colors beyond the range of human sight.
“Hey, Bug,” I said.
Tiny “Bug” Bateman (né Charles Bateman) had weighed three hundred pounds when we first met. Somewhere along the way in our dealings he became aware of Zephyra Ximenez. He fell in love with her phone patter and the image he found of her in the virtual world. She told him that he’d have to get in shape if he wanted even a chance with her.
Iran became his trainer and, eighteen months later, he’d lost forty-three percent of his body weight and sixty percent of his fat. Now he ran 10K races and bench-pressed two hundred pounds.
“Leonid,” the beautiful young man hailed.
“Bug,” I said. “You almost ready for a marathon?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“Because a guy named Pheidippides, the first man to run what was to become known as the marathon, ran the distance to warn the Greek army about an enemy attack. He was successful but the exertion killed him. I have no death wish.”
“Did you get my text?” I asked. On the way down I sent a message to Bug about information I needed.
“Yeah. Let me call it up.”
While he was working I thought I’d fill in some gaps.
“Zephyra was asking me about you,” I ventured.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She sounded like she wanted to know what you were up to.”
The computer genius smiled.
“What’s up, Bug?”
“Z told me when we started going out that she was not an exclusive kinda girl. She said that she had a few men friends and didn’t want any of them clinging to her. So we made a deal that we’d get together only once and at most twice a week.
“I called her one time when I guess I shouldn’t have and she was obviously with somebody else. After that I started going out myself. I met this woman named Marcia, head of Western Hemisphere computer operations for Euro-Bank. I plugged a leak they had and she took me to Johannesburg for a weeklong vacation.”
“That’d do it,” I said.
“Here you go,” Bug announced. “Teresa Lesser has no regular cell phone but that doesn’t mean she might not have a throwaway. She hardly ever makes any outgoing calls from her landline. Up until four years ago she used to call a Margaret Rich once a week on Sundays but then that stopped. Rich is her maiden name. Margaret was probably her mother, probably died.