When the Thrill Is Gone (24 page)

Lucky for him and his friends.

EASTERN LIGHT was a temple of ancient East Asian design located in a nicer part of town. On the way over, Chrystal explained the place to both of us.

“They offer shelter for people, body and mind,” Chrystal said. “They teach classes, serve meals, and have small rooms with cots for special cases.”

“And how come you know so much about them?” I asked.

“I volunteer, and I also contribute money.”

“Brody gonna find me here,” Seema said.

“I doubt it,” Chrystal assured her. “They’re under everybody’s radar, and they don’t take many residents. For the first little while, at least, you will be in the inner circle and even the day visitors won’t see you.”

“I’m not givin’ ’em my money,” Seema said.

“They have their own resources,” my client replied. “If you want to hold on to that little bag, that’s fine, no one will try and take it from you.”

“So you just gonna leave me here?” Seema directed this question to me.

“For the time being, sugar. You need a place to get centered.”

“I thought you wanted me to be with you.”

“I never said that. I said I’d get you away from Brody. That meant I’d get you someplace safe, but I’m not a pimp or a gangster. I’m a detective, like the card says.”

“What if I don’t like it here?”

We were parked at the ornate gate of the temple grounds. Chrystal was sitting next to me, while Seema sat in the center of the backseat. I turned around to look her in the face.

“If you don’t like it, you can just leave, or call me and I’ll either come down myself or send somebody I trust to get you.”

“How’m I gonna call? Do they even have a phone in there?”

I reached into William Williams’ satchel and came out with a small black phone wrapped in a power cord, one of the throwaways that Bug kept me supplied with. This I handed to the girl.

“You still have my card?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Did Brody give you that black eye?”

Another nod.

“Then let Chrystal take you in there, and give it three days before you make up your mind what to do.”

It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she expected. But Seema didn’t have much choice.

“Okay,” she said.

I waited in the car while my client escorted the girl through the gate and gardens and into the lavish domed building. I sat there for a quarter of an hour wondering at the odd connection between me and the solid-steel artist.

ON THE TRAIN, Chrystal and I sit side by side, mainly in silence. I used the time to consider the murder of my initial client; also Dimitri and Twill; also Gordo on his deathbed; and, to a lesser degree, the man William Williams.

An hour into the ride I called Seema.

“Hello?” she said after the sixth ring.

“Seema.”

“Mr. Mack-gill?”

“How are you?”

“Okay, I guess. They food taste funny but they nice.”

“You feel safe?”

“I guess. They give me this tiny little room and told me that I could work anywhere I want to for my rent—the kitchen or the laundry, whatevah.”

“I’ll call you at the end of the week to see how you’re doing.”

“If I get cleaned up, can I come down to you?”

“It’s not about that, girl. I’m just helping you.”

“Okay. But you gonna call, right?”

“Definitely.”

If Chrystal heard this conversation she gave no sign of it. She just stared out the window, blinking now and then like a camera on a very slow shutter release.

40

AS WE WERE PULLING into the Newark train station I turned to gaze at her profile.

The train was pulling out again before she asked, “What?”

“You say that you and Cyril don’t have a very powerful erotic connection.”

I didn’t need to say anymore. She understood the implications.

“I know a man,” she said. “His name is Lod, he lives in Astoria. We . . . we get together sometimes.”

“Cyril know about him?”

“Maybe not his name, but he knows.”

“How about a big guy, dressed all in brown, maybe pretends that he’s Cyril sometimes.”

“Him and me? I don’t think so.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s Cyril’s bastard stepbrother—Ira Lamont.”

There was a full stop at the end of her answers. I needed more information, but her tone told me to slow it down. I didn’t mind. I was just another lemming—standing on line.

“AUNT CHRIS!” a child yelled when we came into the door.

Then all the children mobbed the woman their mother had pretended to be. They hugged and kissed and finally got down on the floor, the whole gang of them.

The four-year-old, Dorian, moved away after a while. The copper-colored boy picked up a stuffed tiger and started a conversation with it.

“Dorian,” Chrystal said playfully.

“Yes?” he said in the same tone and timbre.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Yes, I do,” he said, still looking at his doll.

“Then come here and give me some sugar.”

The boy laughed and ran back into the brood.

AFTER A GOOD WHILE of playing and reconnecting, Theda took the kids to her room for the castle game that everyone liked to play. Aura, Chrystal, and I sat at an oval table that looked down on Gramercy Park, there to sip wine and discuss murder.

“So you don’t know what your sister was talking about when she came to my office?” I asked Chrystal.

“No,” she said, “not at all. I mean, I
did
feel pushed out by Cyril, and I was worried about his history with wives ending up dead, but he didn’t want to kill me. And even if he did I wouldn’t go to Shawnie about that. She could hardly hold her own life together.”

“But you gave her the money she paid me with.”

“I gave her fifty thousand dollars. Some of it was for her and some to give to Tally if he needed it. She said that she wanted to get out of that commune and get a job in a beauty shop.”

“And you just gave her that much money?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“So? My husband owns a farm in Brazil that would take you three weeks to hike across. My room in his house is worth a million dollars on the open market. And, anyway, I don’t really care about money.”

Aura was silent, listening to a conversation both spoken and unspoken.

“Fatima told me that they buried her mother in a garden near where they lived,” Chrystal said.

“I called the police. If they found her it should have been in the papers.”

“It was,” Aura said. “This morning. The police found her yesterday.”

Without being asked, Aura went into the kitchen and came back with the
Post
. The story was pushed to page eight because of a drug overdose in Hollywood, a has-been star who made the headlines one last time.

We were silent while Chrystal read her sister’s pop obituary.

The children’s laughter wafted in from down a hallway and through a door.

Chrystal put the paper down and looked at me.

“I have no idea what’s going on here,” she said. “But I want you to find out who did this.”

“She hired me to protect you,” I said.

“She can stay here, Leonid,” Aura said. “No one knows, and the children need her.”

“Thank you,” Chrystal said and the deal was sealed.

“I’m not the police,” I said to anyone who wanted to listen. “I don’t arrest people, or solve crimes for that matter. I will look into this deeply enough to make sure you and Shawna’s kids are safe. But when I get anywhere near the truth I’ll turn it over to the cops. Arresting people and bringing them to trial is what you pay your taxes for.”

“Okay. I just need to know.”

That was the end of our little tête-à-tête-à-tête. It was time for me to get out there and make the streets safe for artists and orphans. But sitting at that table, between those two women (either one of whom I loved more than my wife of twenty-odd years), I was frozen.

That’s when Chrystal reached across the table and touched my left wrist.

“Thank you.”

Aura took in this intimacy. I noticed her and she saw this regard in my eyes. It was the way Escher probably saw the world: an endless reflection of awareness advancing and receding.

“Aura,” I said.

“Yes, Leonid?”

“I might need a space to work this thing.”

“Office or apartment?”

“An apartment would do fine.”

Without a word she stood up and went to her bedroom door.

When she was gone, Chrystal said, “Don’t worry. I won’t cause a problem.”

Yet another point of view in the endless knot of desire.

Aura came back with two key chains that each held three keys.

“The place is on East Thirty-first, over near Madison,” she said. “Address and apartment numbers are on the tags.”

“Keep this and leave it downstairs at the Tesla,” I said, handing back one of the key chains. “Tell them that someone coming from me will pick them up. And can you make sure that there’s a live telephone jack?”

“Yes.”

“And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Get somebody to go to Mardi and ask her for the special black phone. Get them to connect it at the apartment.”

She nodded, not quite looking me in the eye.

There was nothing else to say, and so I left the apartment, made my way down the stairs to the front door, and walked outside—where I could start breathing again.

41

Son—
my father rarely called me son—
you have to remember that when it comes to love, men are less experienced than women—much less. If a woman falls in love she knows just where she is. Her mind as well as her body comes into bloom. When a woman feels love it’s like a great mind opening, like Karl Marx when he first understood capital. When men fall in love, we just turn stupid. A man in love is a man operating without the benefit of history. He thinks that today is different from every other day, that the woman he’s lookin’ at is different, fundamentally, from all other women.

Love will beat you down worse than any bull or truncheon. Love will rob you of your reflexes and everything you know. And because of all that, it will be the greatest challenge you ever meet.

That speech came back to me as whole cloth in the backseat of the taxi I hailed in front of Aura’s building. I’d been thinking about Tolstoy a lot in the previous days. He was a philosopher in reverse; a man who had encountered the truth at an early age and then spent the rest of his life trying to get away from it. I understood, with little rancor, that my old man’s truths were the opposite of themselves, so much so that they appeared workable.

A feeling of filial ardor came over me. I heard my father’s voice again and loved him the way I had as a child. This feeling was like a parasite moving under the skin, that at first fascinates—before the terror sets in . . .

“Here you go,” the gray-headed white cabbie said.

We were in front of Cyril Tyler’s building.

I’d spent the whole time unaware of its passage.

. . .
a man in love is a man operating without the benefit of history
. . .

THE LIGHT-COLORED DOORMAN with the beautiful voice recognized me. He didn’t like me any more than the last time we met but posed no challenge to my entry.

I took the first elevator, negotiated the doorless hallway, and entered the second lift. This took me to the suburban New Jersey mansion on the top of the building.

There was an Olympian feel to the open space.

Phil, the whitest black man in America, was approaching from across the lawn. I waited for him to arrive, wondering what it felt like to work in a place like that.

“Mr. McGill,” Phil said when he reached me.

It might have been a greeting, but it lacked sincerity. His tone and the look in his eye said,
Why are you here
?

He was wearing a peach suit and a sweet, citrusy cologne.

“Phil.”

“What do you want?”

“Common courtesy would be nice.”

Phil had no response to that, so I said, “I’d like to talk to Mr. Tyler again. The real Mr. Tyler. Not his lawyer or his bastard brother—the man himself.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You can’t come up here making demands, Mr. McGill. You’re forgetting your place.”

My
place.
For a moment I was flummoxed by the young man’s words. This tickled me. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I was actually surprised by something someone said.

Phil believed that he’d gotten the upper hand due to my silence. He said, “So if you don’t mind . . .”

“You know, Phil, you’re right.”

“What?”

“Well,” I added, “not right exactly, but accurate—about place, I mean. You and I are in different places. You up here on the mountaintop, with blue sky and bright sun no matter what time of day it is. There’s never a shadow over you, and even on a cloudy day the light gathers in the clouds above your head.”