“Stop,” I said in a voice that I hadn’t used in fifteen years.
Dimitri, cut off in midsentence, stared at me.
“Come on out in the hall,” I said to my only true son.
I turned to leave the room. He had no choice but to follow in my wake.
We stood there face-to-face, but Dimitri was looking down at my shoes. D snorted now and then, his shoulders hunched — waiting for the attack.
“I want to ask you something, son,” I said.
“What?”
“Why do you think your mother is so upset?”
“Because she doesn’t want me to grow up and be my own man, that’s why.”
“It’s because she’s afraid.”
Dimitri lifted his head to look me in the eye.
“Afraid of what?” he asked.
I didn’t have to answer.
“That was a long time ago,” he complained.
“Two years isn’t all that long. And she was living with that gunrunner in Russia less than a year ago.”
“She didn’t know.”
“That’s why your mother’s afraid,” I said. “Because Tatyana has lived an outlaw’s life. But you’re so in love with her that you deny the truth.”
Dimitri and I look a lot alike. Our faces were not made to express powerful emotions. Our people carried heavy loads and looked into the wind. But right then there was unbridled passion in his eyes and a quiver coming up from his neck.
“So what are you sayin’, Pops? You don’t want me to go?”
“That would be like me tellin’ a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There’s gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, with Taty, there might even be men with guns. All I need you to do is think about that.”
“So you agree with me moving?”
“Honey, I know what that girl means to you. I look at her and even my blood pressure gets dangerous. Just understand that your mother can only do what a mother can do, like you doin’ what you need.”
“And you understand why I dropped out of school for a while?”
“She’s got a good gig at that Columbia program. It’s the man in you workin’ to help her make her way through. But what you got to remember, D, is that it’s a gift, not an investment. Tatyana is not a bankbook.”
That last bit of wisdom put a new wrinkle in my son’s brooding brow. It was one of the longest talks we’d had in a dozen years and carried more meaning than anything we’d discussed since he passed puberty.
There was a question brewing behind his furrowed eyebrows. He even took in a breath to expel the words.
“Hey, Bulldog,” Twill said at just the wrong moment.
“Wha?”
“Come help us bring all these boxes downstairs.”
Twill, Mardi, and Shelly all came out, carrying boxes. From long experience they all knew how touchy things were between me and Dimitri. I was sure that they meant to help, to get him working, so that I didn’t lose my temper and knock him to the floor.
“Okay,” the man/boy said.
He stomped back into the room, grabbed three boxes, then followed his siblings and Mardi down the hall.
I went into the room to see Tatyana, sitting comfortably on the floor, working with D’s clothes and smaller items. She was wearing thin cotton pants the color of beached coral and a sky blue blouse that was loose and yet still somehow appreciative of her figure.
I hunkered down easily, part of the boxer’s side of my daily training, and looked at her.
“Not a very pleasant induction into the family,” I said.
“She loves him,” Tatyana Baranovich explained, shrugging her left shoulder.
“Even still, it must not feel too good.”
“It is not my business about what happens between a son and his mother. I can only be here for him if he wants me.”
She was working with the socks and watches, cuff links that D had never used and scraps of paper that he was always making notes and little drawings on.
“He’s been making those little doodles since he was a child,” I said.
“He has great talent.”
She stopped working then and looked straight at me. There seemed to be an accusation in the words.
I remembered again what a formidable character Dimitri’s girlfriend was.
“Did you meet my friend Mr. Arnold?” I asked.
There was more than one intention behind the question. Immediately I wanted to derail her insinuation that I dismissed my son’s talents and abilities. I believed in D but he purposely kept me out of his life.
On the other hand, I didn’t only want to know what Hush thought about Tatyana; I was also interested in how she saw the ex-assassin.
“Yes,” she said, shaking out a pair of black-yellow-and-green argyle socks.
“What did you think of him?”
She rolled the socks, placed them in a box, and selected another pair from a pile on the floor.
“Well?” I prompted.
“He has dead eyes,” she said to the floor.
“What do you mean?”
“He is one of those men my babushka used to tell me about.”
“What men?”
“The tightrope walkers who have their death on one side and yours on the other.”
9
Katrina’s Snoring could be heard throughout the apartment. She sawed on while the kids packed and carried, ate sandwiches and cleaned. Dimitri spent half an hour whispering with Tatyana in a corner of the kitchen. After that he calmed down. He stopped talking about his mother and woes and concentrated on preparing for his new life with the Mata Hari of the Upper West Side.
After they had all gone, ferried by Hush to the new place, the only sound was Katrina’s rough breathing.
I stayed home out of duty to my wife. She was in pain, more than she ever had been in our long years together — and apart. I suppose I was worried about her.
But the sound of her snoring, for some reason, unsettled me. Soon after the kids were gone I went into the dining room and closed the door. There I took a crystal whiskey glass from the cabinet and poured myself a drink from the decanter.
The snoring was diminished but not extinguished. It sounded like recurring susurration from a storm the other side of thick stone walls.
The cognac didn’t help. Rather than providing bliss it exaggerated my habit of going over and over facts that I knew and could not change.
Breland Lewis had to call in a lot of favors to get Zella’s case back in the courts. He used every bit of his talent and guile to persuade the female convict to let him represent her. Then he had to present new evidence that had to seem to have been derived from a priori investigation and not from actual knowledge concerning the facts in the case.
I had replaced the wrappers on the cash with fakes and used blood from a Lower East Side donor named Rainbow Bill to replace the blood I had been presented with. For ten dollars and a quart of wine I got six good drops.
The lock they snipped off her storage space wouldn’t have opened with the key they’d taken from her. For anyone willing to look closely enough it was obvious that she’d been framed.
I’d gone through those elaborate precautions because the job had been brought to me by Gert and I was worried that Stumpy Brown might have put her in jeopardy somewhere up the line.
Getting my preparations together in front of a sympathetic judge cost money — a lot of it.
Thinking about Zella while listening to Katrina’s faraway exsufflations I remembered the last time I happened upon hard breathing.
It was in an apartment in Queens, not too far from LeFrak City. At three-seventeen on a Thursday morning I entered the building through a side entrance and made it up the stairs without being noticed. The door to apartment 3G was ajar.