More important to me, as I ambled up Tenth Avenue, was Lemon Charles. He had taken the life of a habitual criminal and turned it around, if only for a brief span of time. He wrote poetry, dealt in it, slept with a poet at night, and was asked politely to leave by cops that saw him as a tourist guide rather than a petty con.
This was cause for hope.
I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. Maybe I could become a poet or a fifth-grade math teacher... This notion tickled me. The humor caught me by surprise and I laughed so hard that two young women, who were walking in the opposite direction, actually veered out into the street to avoid me. I felt bad about it. I wanted to apologize to them for the outburst. But just the idea of apologizing for my humor sent me on another jag of hilarity.
Finally I went out into the street myself and hailed a yellow cab. The avenues were not safe for young women and poets — not while a laughing hyena like me was on the prowl.
I had the cab bring me to my building on the Upper West Side, not a block away from Riverside Drive. Parked out front was a small U-Haul truck. The man sitting in the driver’s seat was a murderer and I was his only friend.
I walked up to the street-side car window, intending to greet Hush, but he was in the middle of a sentence.
“... I don’t think that it matters what you do,” he was saying. “I mean, it matters, but it’s more the way you do it and your attention to detail...”
“Hey, man,” I said. It wouldn’t do to eavesdrop on Hush for too long. He was a stickler for his privacy.
“Leonid,” he said.
I moved around to see that he was talking to Twill, my youngest and favorite child. We might not have been related by blood, but Twilliam, at the tender age of eighteen, had committed more crimes, and more lucrative ones, than most hoodlums and thieves. I had him in tow as a detective-in-training at my offices, but it was a toss-up if I could save him from his own brilliant, if bent, ways.
“Hey, Pops,” Twill said.
He was wearing faded jeans and a graying but still white T-shirt, the appropriate attire for a young man helping his older brother move out of the house. Twill was always appropriately dressed for any occasion.
“What’s up, boy?” I asked.
“Everybody’s up there workin’,” he said. “Bulldog and Taty, Shelly, and even Mardi dropped by. Moms ain’t too happy about it though.”
“Her baby’s moving out,” I explained.
“I think it’s more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s drinkin’ pretty hard.”
I sighed. That had been Katrina’s MO for some time. At first it was just when she’d sneak out with one of her boyfriends — once or twice a week. She’d come home a little tipsy, happy not sloppy. But lately she’d been drinking every day.
“Why’ont you go upstairs and help your brother, Twill? I’ll be there in a minute.”
“You got it,” the young man said. He hopped out of the passenger’s seat and headed for the front door to our building.
“That’s some kid you got there,” Hush said.
“He’ll be a helluva man if he survives his own criminal genius.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the one who stood in his way.”
Twill had called Hush to come help in the move. He had the number from an emergency list I’d given him, because, despite his criminal proclivities, he was the most trustworthy member of the family.
Hush had told Twill that he had to check his schedule and then called me to make sure it was okay. He knew that I might be uncomfortable having New York’s most successful assassin (albeit retired) carrying my son’s boxes from the eleventh floor to a moving van.
I would have said yes anyway. Twill’s friendliness and generosity could not be suppressed.
And I had an ulterior motive.
“So?” I asked the killer.
“She’s the kinda woman take your life and still you’d have a smile on your face.” He was talking about Tatyana Baranovich, the woman Dimitri was moving out to live with. She was from Belarus and would give Twill a run for his money when it came to working the system while avoiding the consequences.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
“Until the end of the season all aphids are born female and pregnant.”
“Something pertinent.”
“She cares about your boy.”
“You think she’s into anything?” I asked.
Hush was deft and perceptive; he had to be. An assassin deals in absolutes rendered in shades of gray. One slight error could mean his demise.
“I don’t know if she is right now,” he said, “but she will be. No question about that.”
“Yeah,” I said with another world-weary sigh. “I know.”
“You want me to kill her?” It was a joke. But if I had said yes, Tatyana wouldn’t have seen another week.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.
I patted the murderer’s shoulder and headed for the front door.
7
Katrina and I had lived in that apartment for more than twenty years. Most days I walked the ten flights to the eleventh floor. That was both my Buddhist and boxing training.
The Buddhists tell you that you have to be mindful of every act, and acquiescence, in your life. They say that life, everything you do and don’t do, is an action that must be brought into the light of consciousness.
For the boxer it’s simpler — all you have to do is keep in shape.
So I rushed up the hundred and forty steps, looking around at nooks and crannies that I did and did not recognize while concentrating on the increased intensity of my only slightly fevered breathing.
The door to our apartment was ajar. I had installed one of the world’s most sophisticated locking systems on the titanium-reinforced portal. The lock was both mechanical and electronic. When the door closed a metal rod was anchored in a slot in the floor below. Only the signal from the family’s keys, or turning the inside knob, would release that bolt.
But what use was it if the door was left open?
I entered the small foyer, closing the door behind me. There were half a dozen boxes stacked in the corner, with a pile of rumpled dirty clothes dumped on top.
The clothes belonged to Dimitri. The fact that they were unwashed and not folded spoke volumes about the drama that I could hear playing out all over the large prewar apartment.
From down the hallway where the bedrooms were I could hear the deep bark of Dimitri’s voice. He was talking to someone; you could tell that by the silences between his rants. He was angry, shouting. This was odd because the only time my blood son ever raised his voice was against me, usually in defense of his mother.
Not that I ever attacked Katrina. It’s just that there was a tight bond between the young man and his mother — a bond much stronger than she and I ever had.
From the dining room came the sounds of argument and shushing. I recognized the contestants by their voices and was about to intrude when Mardi Bitterman came out of the bedroom hallway. She was wearing a dress whose hem came down to her ankles; a faded violet shmata, loose and threadbare — the young woman’s version of Twill’s T-shirt and jeans.
Mardi was five-seven, with pale hair, skin, and eyes. She was slight but had a will tougher than most. There was a midsized cardboard box cradled in her arms.
“Hi, Mr. McGill.” The wan smile she gave me represented greater hilarity than I had guffawing down on Tenth Avenue.
“Mardi. What’s goin’ on?”
My office receptionist and general passe-partout put down the box and sighed. You couldn’t hear the exhalation, only see it in her expression.
“Mrs. McGill is upset that Dimitri’s moving out. I don’t think she likes Tatyana. And Dimitri is mad at his mother, saying all kinds of terrible things down in his room. Twill and I have been doing most of the packing but that’s okay.”