And Sometimes I Wonder About You (11 page)

T
he Chambre du Roi was a big round room with tables set out in an off-center spiral. I got there at 8:12. Monique, the hostess, installed me at a booth that was in the outermost circle. I needn’t have worried about Marella waiting for me. She didn’t get there for another twenty-two minutes.

She stopped at my side of the stall before I had the chance to stand, and leaned over gracefully giving me a wet kiss on the lips. She was wearing a red dress that was close-fitting on the torso but flouncy below the waist.

“You look delicious,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my head.”

Depositing herself in the seat across from me, she smiled prettily and cocked her head to the side.

“I asked them to bring a Beaujolais when you got here,” I said.

“Thoughtful and sexy,” she replied.

I usually feel a lump in my throat when a woman riles me but with Marella the bulge was in my chest. I think she could see the impact she was having because she pursed her lips and let her lovely dark head loll a little farther, bringing her right shoulder up like the back end of an oil derrick.

The wine came along with menus.

“You order for me, Lee,” she said. I couldn’t remember anyone ever calling me Lee; some encounters are just unique.

“I may have to answer my phone from time to time,” I apologized. “My son works for me and he’s in a little trouble.”

“I guess I’ll have to punish you for that.”

“Okay.”

“What kind of trouble is he in?”

“He’s in the company of killers and thieves but they haven’t recognized him for what he is…yet.”

“That shouldn’t be any problem for a strong man like you.”

There had been many times in my life that I’d come across just the right woman at the wrong time, but it was rare that I chanced upon the perfect wrong woman at just the right moment.

We toasted and I almost forgot my problems.

“You sounded tense on the phone last night,” Marella said.

“Son’s in deep shit, wife tried to kill herself three months ago—”

“You’re married?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, tossing off this knowledge as unimportant, and I fell a little deeper into the dark passion she offered.

“I turned down a client two days ago,” I went on, “and he was murdered. The man who killed him, I believe, hired me this afternoon. Somehow I have to take all of that and make it right again.”

“My problems are small potatoes compared to yours,” she said, somehow managing to be both light and serious at the same time.

Before I could speak the waiter came to tell us the specials; at least he tried to. I cut him off, ordering the chef’s specialty Canard la Maison for myself and coq au vin for Marella.

When he left I said, “You probably have a close relationship with your father.”

Frowning, she asked, “Why do you say that?”

“Because only old men use the term ‘small potatoes.’ ”

Marella gasped and stood up. I wondered if I had somehow insulted her and now she was about to walk out.

She held out a hand to me. I took it and she pulled me from the booth.

At the front podium she told Monique that we’d be right back—in French.

Across the street from the restaurant there was a recess between a stationery store and bank. It was a dead-end alley blocked off at the mouth by a large locked plastic crate that was there to hold trash bins. This crate was maybe four feet high.

Marella pulled me until we were partially hidden by the receptacle container. She turned her back to me and lifted the flouncy red skirt. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

“I know you know what to do with that,” she said over her shoulder.

I did know and did not hesitate. There’s not nearly enough said about the smooth warmth of entering a woman without protection or worry. When she pressed back against me I noticed that she was clutching the same sacklike black satin bag she’d carried on the train. A sound erupted from us both simultaneously and I began to move with force that threw her against the wall more than once.

The sounds we made got louder over the seconds and minutes. At one point I glanced to my left and saw that a young couple had stopped to watch; a white man in a black suit and an Asian woman in a rainbow-glitter dress. I noted the couple but they didn’t matter to me.

“Harder, Lee,” Marella groaned.

I can’t remember any orgasm being stronger or more satisfying.

When it was over we put ourselves together and walked out from behind the big crate. The young couple was still standing there, still watching us. I wondered if they might take our place when we were gone.

On the way across the street back to the restaurant I checked my phone. I didn’t want to but there was too much going on. Nothing from Twill but there were eight messages from Zephyra; most of these about Coco Lombardi—most but not all.

Back in Chambre du Roi, Marella made a stop at the ladies’ room.

I spent the few minutes reading over the various texts and e-mails.

“That’s much better,” Marella said when she returned to our booth. “We needed to get that out of the way before being civilized.”

I suppressed the desire to tell her I loved her.

The waiter came, placing garlicky salads before us.

“It was my grandfather,” she told me.

“What?”

“My grandfather and I were close. That’s why I had to fuck you.”

“Who was this guy you were engaged to?” I asked.

“You jealous?”

“As if you were the only woman left in the world.”

“You don’t have to be,” she said instead of answering the question.

“What about that diamond?” I said. I wanted to feel businesslike and sophisticated because Marella was bringing out a beast in me.

“What about it?” Her smile was crazy-making.

“How much did you get for it?”

“Why so many questions, Lee? Isn’t this enough for you?”

“It’s just that I was wondering,” I said.

“About what?”

Neither of us had touched our salads.

“About how you could be so sloppy to have a thug like Alexander Lett get so close.”

Her smile faded when she said, “The less you know, the better.”

“But I know so much already.”

“Like what?” There was a hint of danger in her mien.

“You got engaged to the man somehow knowing that sooner or later he’d break it off,” I said.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. McGill.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m a fool. Otherwise I would have taken your money and ignored the fact of the three-point-six-million-dollar diamond you tricked out of Melbourne Westmount Ericson. There was an article about the engagement and the ring on the society page of the
Washington Post.
”

“Oh my God,” she said with genuine surprise in her lovely, deadly eyes. “You really are a detective.”

“Yes,” I admitted as humbly as I could manage. “I know, for instance, that you have a gun in that bag, that Mr. Lett would have died, or at least he would have sustained serious injury, if he tried to take you. I was the less lethal alternate plan.”

“You’re the kind of man I like to take pictures with. The kind of pictures that drive fiancés mad.”

“You’re something else, Marella Herzog.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, as if there was a choice I had.

“You got me in this now, Mar, I got to make sure the Ericson family steamroller don’t make me Pancake Lee.”

“There’s a lot of rage in you,” she said. It was true but I didn’t know where that fact fit in our conversation.

“Maybe.”

“I’m the kind of girl who can let a man express that rage any way he wants, anywhere he wants.”

“I can see that.”

“So what are you going to do?” she asked again.

“Eat my dinner. Drink my wine. Look at you and be happy. Then walk you home and try to get my mind in the place it needs to be.”

I
surprised Marella Herzog—also known as Mona Briannan, Cassandra Massman, Thulia Lewes, and some other names by sources that Zephyra had forwarded to me. I surprised her not with the knowledge of her aliases but by kissing her on the cheek at the hotel entrance and saying good night.

“You’re not coming in?” she asked.

“Not tonight.”

“Why not? It’s late.”

“It’s a matter of self-preservation.”

“I don’t bite that hard.”

“As I told you, I have other business that cannot be ignored.” My overly formal reply had the desired effect.

She looked me in the eye for a long moment, nodded, and then said, “Okay,” like a confederate, or an accomplice.

I walked the thirty or so blocks back toward my empty apartment. I needed to be on the street to organize my thoughts. Like the table layout of Chambre du Roi, my mind was spiraling and off-center.

Marella was the event that had thrown me out of kilter though she wasn’t what bothered me. Hiram Stent and Josh Farth posed a mortal danger, but that was just business as usual now that I had taken up the dead man’s cause. It was Twill’s dilemma that concerned me most. He was down in a hole somewhere and I didn’t know if my arm was long enough to reach him.

At Broadway and Seventy-second at 11:47 I engaged Twill’s emergency line. He didn’t answer but twelve minutes and eight blocks later he called back.

“You kinda leanin’ on the emergency button, ain’t ya, Pops?” were his first words.

“I need you to come home,” I told him.

“In a few days.”

“Now.”

“Can’t right now.”

“Why not?”

“Tigers up in the garden and tigers down below,” he said paraphrasing his and my, and my father’s, favorite Nasrudin Sufi tale. It meant that any way he turned would mean his demise.

“That bad?” I asked.

“I’ll be home in seventy-two hours,” he said, and then he disconnected the call.

I was pressing the key into the downstairs lock of my apartment building door when he said, “Trot.”

Tolstoy wore light-colored trousers, a dark green T-shirt, and a tan windbreaker that was creased and stained. He was hatless, wore glasses, and was as unfamiliar to me as a father could be.

“I thought you was in the wind, man,” I told him.

“Never again.” He punctuated this solemn oath with a soldier’s abbreviated nod.

Back in the dining room, once again swilling cognac, my father and I faced each other across the hickory table.

“You should get over it,” he said to me.

“What’s that?”

“The rage you feel. The rage that drives you. You were an angry child and now you’re an angry man. It’s no good.”

“That’s not the first time I’ve heard something like that tonight.”

“I’m sorry, Trot. I was wrong.”

When listing my problems on the way back home from the Hotel Brown I had forgotten about my father and the anger he called up in me. I wanted to answer him but the only words that came underscored the fury that he’d already identified. It galled me that I was little more than a child in his presence, that every misstep I had taken in life could be traced back to him.

He was just an old man, an old black man that could have been a train porter or the Martiniquean ambassador to Cuba or Italy. He was a fool and I had been his fodder. The beast that Marella called up in me wanted to rend Tolstoy McGill. This simple truth made me smile.

“What?” my father asked.

“I’ll make you a deal, old man.”

“And what is that?”

“You agree to be a grandfather to my kids and a father-in-law to my wife and I’ll put away the grief.”

“Grief?”

The ex-sharecropper might have been a fool but he was sharp. I had meant to say that I would put away the anger and the rage but instead my tongue said “grief.” Grief. It was at that moment I realized that my entire life had been spent grieving the loss of my father and the death of my mom. Anger was just a shield; the rage simple background music for a child who had pitied himself for decades.

Was I really that shallow and self-involved?

“So what do you say, Clarence?” I asked, using my father’s given name—what he called his sharecropper name.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Answer my question.”

“Your children are my grandkids. Your wife is my daughter-in-law.”

I sat back in the spindly and surprisingly strong dining chair. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, feeling with that outbreath that I was released from the custody of grief.

“Okay,” I said, “now tell me about Nicky.”

“Don’t you ever relax, son?” my father asked. “I mean are you always on some case, some job? Don’t you ever just sit back and watch the TV or jerk off or something?”

Free from sorrow, I laughed and shook my head.

“You know, I killed my first man when I was fourteen,” I said for the first time ever in my life. “If anybody had found out and brought me to trial they would have probably called it self-defense but it was murder for me. I strangled him with my hands. I watched him die and then I burned his body with gasoline fire.

“You live a life like that and the
Beverly Hillbillies
jokes lose their appeal.”

I had never even imagined that my father’s face could hold compassion for anything except the worker and the Revolution.

“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Clarence. I had to kill that man or he would have done it to me. You had to go off and fight your wars. I accept that now. Just don’t sit judgment on me. That’s all I ask.”

My father finished his snifter and I poured him another dram. He drank half of that before speaking again.

“Nikita didn’t start off as an armored car robber, as I’m sure you know,” he said. “He dealt with hijackers and smugglers for years before deciding to rob that one tank and then retire to Tahiti.”

“Do ants retire?” I said, quoting a question my father would ask the straw-man capitalist he so often imagined.

He grinned, showing me his white teeth.

“Nicky never learned his lessons as well as you, Trot,” he said. “Anyway, like I was saying, your brother had been involved with certain smugglers that from time to time intersected with other smugglers who from time to time intersected with so-called terrorists. For a modicum of information on these people, and the promise to reinvolve himself in their business, the feds erased Nikita from their system and freed him to steal, spy, and smuggle, incriminate, and enjoy freedom.”

“Nicky’s a snitch?”

“He likes to say that he’s a government agent but yes, he’s a snitch.”

“Damn. Damn.”

“We all cross the line on a daily basis, Trot. It only took me forty years to realize that.”

“And what about you, old man?” I said as I poured my fourth drink. I was beginning to feel the alcohol in my fingertips and my lips.

“What about me?”

“Why you stayed in the shadows while me and Nicky roved in the street?”

Tolstoy, who I would almost always from that moment on think of as Clarence, looked at me with apologetic eyes.

“In my years in the Revolution,” he said, “I, more than once, was implemental in damaging, destroying, and sometimes assassinating American military and corporate interests and their staffs. I’m on a very special top ten most-sought-after list.”

“Because of the people you killed,” I concluded.

“Because of the knowledge I have. If I was ever brought to trial the prosecution would be forced to reveal things that no American president, military general, or corporate CEO would like to have made public. I’m a threat and so I try to maintain a low profile.”

“Then why come back at all?”

“You and Nicky needed a guardian angel. I watched over you.”

I didn’t say anything to that. If we talked about him playing the role of father-from-the-shadows I might have rediscovered the anger that I had so recently given up. But I really didn’t care about what he thought he was doing or who he feared was after him. I had just solved the most important case of my career. I knew what had happened to me. I knew what he had done and why. So what if there was no pot of gold, no happy ending—truth is its own reward.