I leaned against the receptionist’s desk while Aura shone her stern visage down on me.
“I got a job I’m just finishing up right now,” I said. “I can pay you by tomorrow night.”
She appraised my words with her stormy, sky-colored eyes and smirked. Then she shook her head.
“My number-one job is to get you out of here.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” I asked, standing up straight.
Aura was three inches taller than I but it seemed like a foot. She pulled her head back and sneered, shaking her head ever so slightly.
“Come on,” I said. “Just one day. You know that you can’t evict me if I pay by tomorrow anyway. It’ll just be a lot of paperwork.”
“The owners would like to see it.”
“One day.”
“One day,” she said, “for one kiss.”
It was astonishing to me that something so sweet could hurt so bad. Holding that woman in my arms, I ached for a whole other life, a life that I would never have. When she pressed her shoulder against mine I moaned as much from the pleasure as from the ache.
I pulled away, trying to remember how to breathe.
Her gaze was triumphant.
“I could tell you liked that, Leonid Trotter McGill.”
I hadn’t caught my breath yetv hmy brea.
“You don’t love her,” Aura said. “She’s done you dirt again and again. Why would you stay there when it’s obvious where you want to be?”
“Georg and Simon would fire you if they thought we were together,” I said lamely.
“I can always get another job.”
“I’ll have your money before six o’clock day after tomorrow.”
“I only gave you one day.”
I went to the door, opened it, and looked down at her feet.
Ê€„
4
After Aura had gone I sat down in the receptionist’s chair and put my feet up on her ash desk. I didn’t have a receptionist but it was important to keep up appearances. I might become successful one day and need someone to greet my long line of wealthy clients.
Sitting there, gazing out the window at New Jersey, I wanted nothing more than to have Aura in my life. I wanted her to be my woman in a world where I was an upstanding and respectable citizen with a receptionist who only allowed honest civilians like myself past the front office.
These bouts of fantasy were always bittersweet because thoughts of what I didn’t have always brought me back to the chain around my neck—my wife, Katrina.
“I’M GOING TO leave you, Leonid,” Katrina had said to me one evening eleven months before. We were sitting in the dining room of our West Side apartment, alone.
I looked at her, trying to decipher the meaning of her words.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
Some months earlier Katrina joined a gym, had a surgical procedure that transformed her face from middle-age sag into something quite lovely. I had hardly noticed but by an act of supreme will Katrina had regained much of her youthful beauty.
“I’ve met someone,” she’d said, wanting to keep the conversation going. “His name is Andre Zool.”
“Uh-huh,” I managed to say.
“He’s an investment banker and he loves me.”
“I see,” I said but Katrina heard something different, a complaint.
“You haven’t slept in our bed more than two nights in a row in half a year,” she condemned.
“I’ve been sleeping in the office. I’ve been . . . been thinking.”
“I need a real man in my life. Not a zombie.”
“When are you going?” I asked, wondering about the silence in our seven rooms.
“There’s no use in arguing,” she said.
“I’m not arguing. I’m asking you when you’re leaving.”
“Dimitri is going to stay with Andre and me until he finds a dormitory,” Katrina said, having a conversation in another dimension, with a different Leonid. “Shelly and Twill both want to stay with you.”
“But I had blood tests done,” I said from my separate reality. “Dimitri is the only one that’s mine.”
Katrina, in all her Nordic beauty and savagery, stood up from the table, knocking her chair to the walnut floor.
“You bastard!” she said and then stormed out of our apartment.
That was on a Wednesday, too. For six months I had been brooding over the corruption of my life. Katrina leaving meant nothing to me. We hadn’t loved each other for a very long time. We hadn’t ever lived in the same world.
On Monday Terry Swain announced his early retirement.
On Friday Aura Ullman put me on notice for Hyman and Schultz.
By Sunday Aura and I were lovers and I had decided that the only thing I could do was try to make right what I had done wrong. At night Aura and I slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I begged her to come live with me but she had an adolescent daughter and thought that we should give it some time.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER the real estate market crashed.
Andre Zool had been instrumental in getting his company to buy up fourteen percent of Arizona’s recent mortgage debt—and there was some question of kickbacks. He lost over a billion dollars. Zool got on a plane bound for Argentina, where his family had migrated after World War II.
The next morning I came home from work to find Katrina in our living room with our dour son Dimitri at her side.
“Forgive me,” were her only words.
If she had said anything else, anything, I would have been able to send her away: I would have been able to go off with Aura to start a new life.
MY PRIVATE CELL PHONE, the legal one, rang. Actually it made the sound of a growling bear, the special tone I had given to anyone whose phone number came through as private.
“Mr. McGill?” he said. “Ambrose Thurman here. I tried yo" we. I trur office phone but got no answer.”
“Mr. Thurman. I was just about to call you.”
“With good news, I hope,” the fop detective said.
“Yes, very good news. I have located three of the four men you’re looking for.”
“What are their real names and addresses?” he said, his voice brimming with formality.
“There’s a question of remuneration.”
“A question of what?”
“You know what I’m saying—I need my money first.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Yes—remuneration,” he said, repeating the word carefully. “I will have to have all four names before I can pay you.”
“Well, then I’ll call you later.”
I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and sat back in the phantom’s chair.
There was something odd about Ambrose. He was an Albany detective working for an upstate client. This client wanted definitive information on all four subjects before he would pay.