“We all got rules, Mel.”
The thief, killer, blackmailer, and all-around madman looked up into my eyes. He liked me. He’d murdered his father and burned away the body in the basement of a property he owned in Lower Manhattan, and yet I considered him a friend.
“I know it seems like that,” he said. “I mean, yeah, sure, we all got rules, but that’s not what makes the things we do so complex.”
I knew the man, understood what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, but still I asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s the unexpected exceptions we have to our own commitments. You’re not a killer, a murderer, but you might become one. You easily could. I’m not a sane man, a company man. I’m a lone wolf, but that don’t mean I might not find myself in a domestic situation one day.”
“What’s goin’ on with you, Mel?”
The now-and-then maniac smiled, placed another green jewel in an unexpected square, and said, “I think I got the upper hand here.”
He wasn’t going to divulge the thought process behind secrets about himself; he rarely did.
“I concede,” I said.
“I could go talk to Cormody for you,” Mel offered.
“You could.” I was in an agreeable mood. “But I think I want things to play out the way they are now. I mean, if you go in all gangbusters they might clam up. You know what I mean?”
“You wanna play another game?”
“No.”
“Who cares about what happened to get Quiller where he is?”
“My employer does.”
“Could get you killed.”
“If that was the outcome, you’d protect Aja, wouldn’t you?”
He gazed at me for a very long time.
“With my life,” he said at last.
“That’s all I can ask for.”
There was another long pause. This time Mel was looking inward. At the end of this self-evaluation he nodded.
“You’ll never make a good general, Joe, but you’re one hell of a guerrilla.”
Later on Mel went downstairs to work on refurbishing antique watches that he sold from a little shop in the West Village. I stayed at the Go table perusing the documents stolen from the cowboy, Tex.
It was the most eclectic set of documents I had ever examined. First there was very little English used where language was inserted. Much of the prose was in Spanish, German, and French, but there were also entire pages filled with symbols from Asia and the Middle East.
Mostly there were snapshots of people, mostly men, taken from clandestine angles. There were also maps showing locations both circled and underlined by red pencil markings. I was pretty sure that this was the diary of a hit man.
Outside of the covering initials I didn’t see the name Curt Holiday scrawled or printed anywhere; that was business as usual. What surprised me was that Tex had kept these documents at all. What use could they have been to him or his masters?
When I got to the bottom of the stack I realized that that was where I should have started. This five-sheet file started off with a picture of Alfred Xavier Quiller with Mathilda Prim on his arm. He had on a dark suit, the kind that cowboys wore in the late nineteenth century when attending a wedding or funeral. She was dressed in a white lace gown that dimmed anything and anyone else in her vicinity.
The back side of that page was an architectural map that I was sure depicted the compound where Quiller lived in the West African nation of Togo.
I considered that last file for half an hour or more. When there was nothing else to glean, I took out a burner and entered a number.
“What’s up?” answered Melquarth Frost.
“I’m headin’ out, man. You mind if I leave my car in your garage?”
“Call me when you land.”
12
Noemi Tristel lives on the top floor of a onetime tenement building on 145th a block east of Broadway. The new owners have transformed the working-class apartment house to upper-middle-class studios and one-bedroom condos. The tenants across the six floors are multiracial, middle-class, at least, and definitely transplants to a Harlem that is fast becoming something else. Maybe one day they’ll be calling it Harlow Heights or possibly Haarlem, harking back to its Dutch roots.
The new tenants were all races but mostly white. There’s nothing wrong with that. Things change in America, in the new world, the new Earth, things change all the time. And so it is especially nice when you come across something or someone that defies the relentless tide of transformation.
Carter Tristel was a pickpocket and general sleight-of-hand thief. He could have been a superior magician. He might have become a contender in whiff-whaff at the Olympics somewhere. But he used his skills to steal what he needed to take care of his daughter, Noemi, and her mother, Nimbal Orestry Tristel. When I was still a cop I had a warrant for Carter not two days after Nimbal died of complications from diabetes. I came to the house and seventeen-year-old Noemi answered the door.
“Mom died and we just came back from the mortuary,” she told me. “We got to bury her Sunday. He’s in there on the couch if you want him.”
Carter was a large man. His size made most people feel that he was slow, even lethargic. That’s why no one expected his hands to be so fast. He lay on his left side on the broken-down couch, his big brown belly hanging off the edge. Staring at the far wall, his eyes dropped a tear now and then. I don’t think he saw me.
“Daddy,” Noemi called.
I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from introducing me.
“What?” he asked pitifully.
“Um, you want some water?”
“No, baby,” he said, choking back whatever sadness kindness caused.
Back at the front door I told Noemi about the antique silverware her father was supposed to have stolen.
“If the next officer with a search warrant doesn’t find anything, I don’t think they’ll be able to arrest him,” I told the girl.
She nodded and I left.
Two years later I was a detective third grade in an office I shared with three other officers. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon when Noemi walked in. She was wearing a lovely peacock-blue silk dress and had a pocketbook that probably cost three thousand dollars. She sat on my visitor’s chair and smiled.
Noemi was not a beautiful woman. As a matter of fact, as she aged she became rather plain. But she had eyes that held the power of old-time royalty.
“Carter?” I said.
“He died.”
“What happened?”
“He won the Lotto and then had a heart attack. The funeral is Wednesday next and he asked me to ask you to come.”
That was then.
At 10:07 in the evening after I lost my ninety-second straight game of Go to Melquarth, I rang Noemi’s bell. Through an electric eye she pressed the lock-release button and I walked through. As I headed toward the far end of the slender first-floor hall, someone hailed me.
“Excuse me,” the woman’s voice called.
I don’t know why but I took another step.
“I said excuse me,” the voice insisted.
I stopped and, after a little hesitation, turned.
The young white woman standing there was indeed very pretty. Her figure, her skin, her probably naturally blond hair that bunched on slender shoulders.
Everything about her was lovely except for the twisted expression on her lips. That was quite ugly.
“Do you belong here?” those lips asked.
“Right here?” I asked, pointing at the floor.
“I will call the police,” she threatened.
“That is your prerogative, ma’am. The police are here to serve everyone — living and dead.”