“Who are you?” he managed to ask.
“Peter Cooly used to work in here with you, right?” I replied, gesturing to an empty desk in the corner.
“Peter’s dead.”
“Yep. Died just this last March. His second heart attack in two months. Last day he worked was February nine.”
“So?”
“Did he have access to the books, bank accounts?”
Terry Swain had gray eyes that were very expressive. They widened as if seeing the rope that could save him just inches out of reach.
“Pete was honest.”
“He was that. But he was a loner, too. No parents or wife, not even a girlfriend.”
“So?”
“You got any money, Terry?”
“What’s your name?”
“Leonid McGill is my name. Jimmy Pine sent me.”
Jimmy was a bookie. Terry was one of his best customers.
“Leonid? What kind of name is that for a black man?”
“My father was a Communist. He tried to cut me from the same red cloth. He believed in living with everybody but his family. McGill is my slave name. That’s why I got to do business with fools like you.”
“What kind of business?”
“You ever hear of Big Bank?”
“On Forty-ninth?”
“Peter Cooly had a savings account there. I got a guy, a business associate owes me a favor, who works with a guy who works there. The guy in the bank can make it look like Pete deposited an extra twenty-four thousand in his account over the last six years.”
“He can?” Terry passed gas then. He was a very worried man. “How?”
“My friend and his friend need six thousand apiece and then there’s the twenty-four.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.” Terry was so upset that he rose to his feet. “They’re gonna prosecute me, Mr. McGill. They’re gonna send me to prison.”
“Say the word and I’ll throw just enough suspicion on Pete so that any half-decent lawyer could keep the new owners from dragging you into court. Hell, they won’t even be able to take your pension.”
“Where am I gonna get thirty-six thousand dollars?”
“Forty-six,” I said, correcting his perfect math. “You need ten for the lawyer.”
“And what about you? What do you get out of this?”
“You got a jeweler vacating a suite of offices down on the seventy-second floor. Six rooms with views south and west. I like having a big office with a good view. People look at you differently when they think you’re livin’ large.”
“So?”
“You’re still the building manager. Give me a twenty-year lease at eighteen hundred a month and I’ll pull the trigger on Pete.”
“The Melmans are paying eleven thousand,” Terry said.
I shrugged.
“I don’t have the money,” the sandy-haired fraudster complained.
“Jimmy Pine said that he’d advance it to you. I mean, you’ll have to get another job to pay him back, but I bet you’d rather run a hot dog stand than spend your sunset years in prison.”
We haggled for over an hour but in the end I got everything I wanted. Hyman-Schultz, real estate developers, dropped the charges when Breland Lewis, attorney-at-law, brought evidence to their attention that Peter Cooly was just as likely a candidate for the crime, even more so because Terry was always broke.
Swain retired early and bought a hot dog cart. Whenever I see him he gives me a hot sausage on the house.
Some people, when they see my office, think that I’m putting on airs. They want to know what I pay for rent but I never say. Others are quietly impressed, believing that there’s more to me than they at first thought. The reaction to my posh workspace could be anything but whatever it is I’m left with an edge.
WHEN I GOT OFF the elevator on the seventy-second floor I felt a rush of satisfaction. The light fixtures along the hall are polished brass, and even the floor is a complex design of purple, green, and white marble tiles. The Tesla has wide hallways and the doors are heavy, hewn from solid oak. I got to the end of the hall and turned left. It was no surprise to see Aura Antoinette Ullman at the far end, waiting at my front door. Warren Oh had probably called her.
Aura was a tall woman, the color of dark burnished gold. She was near forty with a womanly maturity about her that always made me feel a thrumming somewhere near my heart. Her wavy hair was blond, naturally, and her cool-colored eyes defied definition by the color wheel. Her mother was Danish and her father a black man from Togo, an ambassador to some east European nation. Her father’s Christian name was Champion. Aura had told me that her mother, Helene, married him for his name, but was let down.
She, Aura, took her mother’s maiden name and came with her to New York when she was fifteen. She majored in business at CCNY and took over Terry Swain’s job when he went into the hot dog business.
“You’re seventeen days late on the rent,” she said when I reached her.
I pulled out a keychain that held the seven keys I needed to open the locks that secured the outer chamber of my inner sanctum.
Hyman and Schultz had figured out that I was the likely cause of their problems, but they didn’t have proof. So when they hired Aura they told her that her top priority was breaking my lease.
“The landlords want their money,” Aura said. Her voice was also golden—sexy with an added vibration that sent chills down into my shoulder blades.
I had opened three locks.
“I will start eviction proceedings tomorrow if I don’t have the rent by tonight.”
Five locks.
“You know that your lease is a crime, Mr. McGill.”
So’s that black dress you’re wrapped in,
I thought.
Seven locks and the door came open.
When we walked in, the lights came on automatically. A tripped switch turned on three silent cameras that took digital pictures every eight seconds. The cameras were installed on a rare site-call by Tiny “Bug” Bateman himself, and so they were foolproof. I would look at the pictures of Aura later, after she’d finished threatening me and went back to her own office.
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 yet.
“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.
4
A
fter 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 your 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.
I decided that I’d need more information before handing over what I had to the persnickety, overly formal Albanyite.
But I appreciated his call. Moping over lost love, a loveless relationship, and other things was no good. It tended to give me bad dreams.
In order to keep the momentum toward a healthier state of mind, I entered the code on the electronic lock that allowed entrance to my interior offices. Once I was ensconced behind my ebony desk, looking down over lower Manhattan, I logged onto a specially constructed computer using the ID
[email protected] This allowed me secret entrée to my favorite son’s personal domain.
Once a week or so, as a rule, I perused Twill’s personal e-mails. I did this because Twill, for all his superior qualities, was a natural-born criminal. He didn’t hurt people physically but he was a whiz at getting in and out of locked rooms, performing Internet scams on children of his age, and putting A in touch with B to garner C. He had at least seventeen separate e-mail addresses, all of which were forwarded to
[email protected] He had to have a pretty good hacker who helped him with all this, but I had Tiny “Bug” Bateman, and Tiny, by his own estimation, was the best in the world. Tiny had set me up so that by using the double dollar sign and the word “hunter” I could shadow Twill’s every communication.