When the Thrill Is Gone (19 page)

Aura smiled and I learned something about her: she loved the disarray of children.

“I had to buy clothes for all of them,” she said proudly. “They said that you took them away without time to pack.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

She smiled and gestured toward the wall-sized window that looked down on the private park.

In a small clearing Theda and Fatima were leading the brood in a lopsided circle dance. Theda held the littlest boy, Uriah, and Boaz carried his smallest sister. They were laughing and singing.

Aura smiled down on them.

“Thank you, Leonid,” she said.

“I love you,” I replied.

“Let’s sit down.”

I SAT IN a blue cushioned chair and she on the off-white sofa that had suffered some stains in the last twenty-four hours.

Noticing me notice the spots, she said, “I can get the furniture reupholstered after you’ve found their aunt.”

I wanted to ask her what she’d found out from Fatima and her little clan but there was a question on the table.

“There’s no time for us, Leonid,” she said.

“I can make time.”

“No,” she said, “you can’t. You’ve got too much to do, too many irons in the fire.”

“We could leave New York. I’d do that for you.”

“I can’t allow myself to go there,” she said. “Please ... be my friend for the time being.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe forever.”

I had killed men with my bare hands, taken enough punishment to have died many times over myself. I had enemies and a special policeman assigned to bring me down and send me to prison. There were people suffering at that very moment because I had framed them. And yet there I was—a teenager with a gaping heart.

I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, remembering what was important and why I was there.

“Have the children told you anything?” I asked.

“Only that they want to go live with their Aunt Chris in a house on top of a big building.”

“Did they talk about what happened to their mother?”

“I think she was murdered, Leonid.”

I didn’t want to say what I knew right then. She loved having those children in her house and there didn’t seem to be any reason to corroborate her fearful empathy.

Luckily the front door flew open, spilling in children along with their laughter and thumping grace.

“Hello,” Aura said, rising for her daughter and the small mob.

They laughed and greeted and talked about needing water and bathrooms and a DVD.

Theda and Aura started to work on these needs while the oldest sister stood to the side, arching her body in an odd, mature way.

“Fatima,” I said.

The girl widened her eyes and walked toward me. She held out her hand and I led her out onto the tiny balcony.

Pulling the glass door shut, I sat on one of the two pink cast-iron chairs out there. Fatima climbed into my lap as if we had known each other for her entire life.

“I like you, Fatima,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she agreed.

“And I’m going to be honest with you because that’s the only way we’ll be able to help each other.”

“All right.”

“You know your mother’s gone, right?”

“Yes.”

“And so we have two things that we have to do,” I said.

Fatima put her right hand against my chin and rubbed the stubbly hair there. Through my peripheral vision I could see Aura watching us from inside the apartment.

“What two things?” Fatima asked.

“I have to find your aunt so that I can get the man who made your mom go away and so that you can go live with Chrystal.”

“We want to be with our Aunt Chris,” Fatima said with emphasis.

“So we want the same thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me what you know about Aunt Chris,” I said.

“She’s beautiful and brave and never lies about anything she says she’ll do,” Fatima said in one breath. “And one time when Mama Shawna was sick she promised to take all of us to live with her if anything ever happened to Mama.”

“That’s very nice of her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea where Auntie Chris might go if she wanted to get away for a while?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Aunt Chris told me that I shouldn’t never tell anybody, not even Mama.”

“And have you ever told anyone?”

“Only Boaz, and he didn’t say anything.”

“Well, Fatima,” I said, “I know all about secrets. I have so many of them that I forget what they are sometimes. And I don’t want to make you tell something you promised not to, but I have to find Chrystal and you have to decide if finding her is worth telling her secret. I mean, do you think that she’d want you to tell me?”

Her serious face enchanted me: a child making her mind work in ways that felt impossible but must be done.

“I think she wants us to find her,” she said at last.

“Where can we do that?”

“Maybe at her getaway house in Saltmore, Altmore, something. It’s a place that she bought a long time ago when she sold her first painting. It’s a big secret, so you can’t tell anybody else. It’s a little white house with a yellow one on the right and a gray one on the left. And you have to take a train ride to get there.”

“Thank you, Fatima,” I said. “You can count on me, I will find Chrystal.”

A FEW BLOCKS away from Aura’s I made a call on my cell phone.

“Hello?” a pleasant voice answered on the seventh ring.

“Tam? It’s LT.”

“Mr. McGill,” she said.

“That open offer for dinner good for tonight?”

“Absolutely. We’re eating at about six-thirty. Timothy will be in maybe an hour before that.”

“I’ll get there as close to six-thirty as I can.”

I got off the phone and shivered like a wet dog.

31

WASTING TIME IS a big problem in the world we live in, that’s for sure. But it doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to know what the goal is for every step we take. Sometimes we do things that are not directly connected and yet are still significant.

These activities, in a life like mine, might at times be dangerous, or even foolhardy; but life, even at its best, is a sucker’s enterprise. No deity would trade places with one of us fool mortals, not even for an instant.

AT 6:24 I knocked at a door to a one-family home on Fifth Avenue not far north of Washington Square Park. It was a fivestory pink affair with dark-green vines growing on the walls. The stairs were greenish marble and the oak door ancient. There were three hidden camera lenses watching me, two from in front and one from the branches of a tree at the sidewalk.

A man answered the door. He was not a centimeter over five nine, with a slender (but not thin) frame, combed short brown hair, and eyes the same tone. His trousers were green and his tan shirt square-cut.

He was wearing an old pair of brown, backless slippers.

“LT,” he said. He even smiled.

Slippers.

I nodded and muttered something that was meant to sound like a greeting.

“Come on in,” the man said, moving backward and gesturing broadly with his left arm.

The foyer, and every other room I had seen in that home, had dark hardwood floors and teal-colored walls.

“Can I take your jacket?” the man asked.

As I shook my head I could hear the thunder of little feet.

“Surprise, Uncle L!” the seven-year-old boy yelled.

From three feet away he bounded into my arms. I swung the nut-brown boy around in a circle and then held him high in the air.

“You got me, Thackery,” I said. “You got me.”

“I got him, Daddy,” the boy, now almost upside down, shouted at the man.

Thackery’s father looked worried as any man might when a brute like me manhandles his offspring.

“Leonid,” a woman said from the doorway leading to the ground floor of the twelve-million-dollar home.

“Mama, I got Uncle L,” Thackery said, laughing madly.

The woman was darker even than her son. She had a plain face but there was something about her that spoke of prayers and angels—an inner beauty that could not be contained.

“Tam,” I said and she came forward to kiss me while her squirming son thumped down to the floor.

“You’re here right on time, LT,” the mild-mannered man said. “We just put dinner on the table.”

His wife smiled, kissed me again, and then hugged me.

“Come on in,” she said.

I smiled and she put her arm around me.

I’m proud to say that I didn’t tremble at all.

A MAN WOULD have to be crazy to sit down to dinner with a contract serial killer, even if that murderer was now retired and driving a limo to keep busy.

Tamara had prepared a meatloaf of veal and lamb crusted with chunks of apples and peaches. There was also a tropical fruit salad, wild rice cooked in chicken broth, and collard greens simmered all day along with ham hocks and then finished with pearl onions.

The dining table was from a sixteenth-century French master, carved with gargoyles and saints along the apron. Each leg was a horse standing on its back legs carrying riders who were holding on for dear life.

The food, the décor, even the color of the walls made little sense outside the family’s unique context, but this was the home of a man and woman, neither of whom should have been able to survive in this modern world.

“Daddy,” the boy said.

“Yes, Thackery?”

“Uncle L told me that he almost fell out of the tree across the street one time.”

“He did?” Hush said, smiling and looking at me.

“Uh-huh. Would you almost fall?”

“I wouldn’t be silly enough to climb a tree.”

“Why not? I like climbing trees.”

“Maybe that’s why your uncle told you that he almost fell,” Hush suggested. “Maybe he was telling you that anybody can hurt themselves falling out of a tree, even him.”

“Not me,” Thackery said bravely. “I wouldn’t ever hurt myself fallin’ out of a tree, huh, Mama?”

“Not as long as your father or I am there to catch you,” Tamara Cunningham, Thackery’s best teacher, said.

“And Uncle L,” the boy said. “Uncle L would catch me, too.” It wasn’t a question.

We had a very enjoyable meal. Every now and then Thackery would get loud or fidgety but all Tamara had to do was reach over to touch him and the nervous energy would drain away.

Hush told stories about a brave knight who wore black armor and a beautiful princess who loved him. The princess was kidnapped and the knight’s best friend saved her and then the knight saved the best friend and they all lived in a big pink palace where the full moon shone every night and the days were all sunny.

It was another side of the assassin, a side that only the people in that room ever saw.

It gave me the feeling of being singled out—like an elk in the crosshairs of a high-powered rifle.

AFTER A SERVING of strawberry rhubarb pie and ginger ice cream Hush said, “It’s time for bed, young man.”

Thackery’s eyes showed his disappointment, but he got up to kiss his mother and then me.

“Good night,” he said and Hush led him off to bed.

When they were gone Tamara made to rise, saying, “I’ll get you some more coffee.”

I held out a hand, not quite reaching her.

“I don’t need it,” I said, and she sat back down.

We were silent a moment. She liked me. I was that knight’s friend. I had saved her life, and Thackery’s, too.

“Timothy loves you,” she said after a deliciously enjoyable period of quiet.

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell him that.”

She laughed and said, “You’re the closest thing he has to family outside of us.”

“How are you doing, Tam?”

“I love my husband and son,” she said. “They are everything to me. But . . . but I’d like to have something for myself. Maybe I could take classes or something. It’s only that Timothy worries so much. Whenever I’m gone he thinks the worst. Once I went to visit my brother in Florida and when I came back he was a wreck.”

I remembered that long weekend. It was the only time that I had ever seen Hush drink alcohol.

“Tell him what you need, honey,” I said. “He’ll just have to figure out how to deal with it. And I’ll find you a babysitter, one that’ll meet his high standards.”

Tamara smiled. She and I were on the same page for reasons completely opaque to me.

Hush walked back into the room then.

“He wants you to come up and tell him a story,” he said to his wife.

“Okay,” she said. “Will you still be here when I finish, Leonid?”

“You bet.”

When she was gone Hush went back to his chair.

“She likes having you here,” he said.

“You wanna go take a walk with me?”

He knew what my words meant. I could see the funeral lights going up behind his eyes.

32

ON THE STREET we looked like any two working-class stiffs at the end of a too-long day. Hush wore a brown jacket over his tan shirt and I was in an iteration of the blue suit that was my uniform.