And Sometimes I Wonder About You

12

The rest of the day I concentrated on the e-mails that didn’t need answering. Seventeen of these were replies to my ad in the New York Literary Review. Some Bills and Williams, lonely johns, and a few vanity presses thought that I might really be looking for them. But none of these people or places were the self-named Tolstoy McGill, my missing father. For half my childhood and all of my adult life I had thought the anarchist-revolutionary had perished in South America fighting some dictatorship or another. But Tolstoy wasn’t dead. I’d made an appointment to meet him for dinner one night but Katrina decided that afternoon to kill herself and my father once again faded into speculation.

By 7:14 I was through for the day. Mardi was still at her desk. I sometimes got the feeling that she would work twenty-four hours a day if she could.

“Who’s looking after your sister?” I asked.

“Marlene’s staying at our downstairs neighbors’ apartment tonight. Their daughter Peg is her best friend. They move back and forth between the apartments.”

Mardi looked up at me and I turned away before our eyes could focus on each other.

“Am I going crazy or did Kit just knock on the door?” I said to the door.

“I had Bug give me a button to turn off your buzzer when I’m in,” she said. “I figure we both don’t have to be bothered.”

“What if you forget to turn it back on?”

“It’s on a two-hour timer. After that it goes back to both.”

I would have liked to find something wrong with her logic but Mardi was a bright kid with an old soul; just the kind of employee you wanted in a world filled with a starstruck workforce and electronic memories.

Even her smile was knowing.

“In the old days,” I said, “when I was younger than you are now, people would say ‘you’re a good egg’ to people who did right most of the time.”

“Really?”

“You’re a good egg, Mardi.”

“Am I?” she said, looking me straight in the eye.

A microsecond of fear clutched at my heart, not quite long enough to get a good grip.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, thinking for the second time that this week was going to be a challenge.

I ran up all ten flights to the eleventh floor of our family apartment, a block east of Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. There was a new locking system since a pair of East European assassins had broken in and tried to end my career. I used two keys and a remote control so small that it was hardly larger than the button that worked it. The kids didn’t argue about the new process because I left the bullet holes in the wall where the killers missed.

Another reason the kids didn’t mind was because two of them had moved out and the youngest, Twill, rarely spent the night.

I’m not what most people would think of as a family man. I don’t come home for dinner every evening — many nights I don’t come home at all. But over the decades I got used to a wife that cooked and kids that complained. The muted sounds through the large prewar apartment had made a place in what some might call my heart. And so the emptiness in the apartment felt... wrong.

I went to the dining room, poured forty-year-old cognac into a crystal snifter, and sat at the big hickory dining table. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d sat behind a desk all day long only to come home and pull up a chair at another table. Maybe I could invite Mardi and her sister to live with me.

When I was pouring the third drink I decided to call Marella. Somewhere in the afternoon I had picked up the phone and stared at her number. I realized that talking to her would just call for more passion — and I didn’t think I had any more to give. But saying good-bye to Mardi, thinking I should invite her to live with me, made Marella a necessity, not an option.

When I informed the hotel operator of my name she put the call through.

“Hello, Leonid.”

“Hey.”

“Are you downstairs again?”

“No. I’m home.”

“Do you want some company?”

“Who is Alexander Lett?”

“Who?”

“Alexander Lett. That’s the name of the guy I slammed into the wall yesterday.”

“I didn’t know his name. I couldn’t prove that he was sent by my ex. But he did follow me from DC.”

“And this all over an engagement ring?”

“Yes.”

“Why does it seem like more than that?”

“It’s a very, very expensive ring.”

“You called me this morning,” I said.

“As soon as I woke up.”

“What did you want?”

“You.”

“For protection?”

“I never had a man put me on his shoulders backward before.”

“That was my first time too.” I was feeling that beast thing again. I liked the heavy beat it brought to my heart.

“You want me to come over?” she asked. “Maybe I could ride you on my back this time.”

I once knew a man named Robin. He was a handsome man with beautiful eyes. For a while in the ’90s Robin was a source of information I used quite a lot. He always denied that he was what he was, a heroin addict.

I asked him one day after watching him shoot up, “How can you say you aren’t addicted when you shoot that shit in your arm every damn day?”

“Not every day,” he murmured, his eyes like twin planets bathed in the radiance of the sun. “Every once in a while when the hunger gets too strong I make myself wait for two days before takin’ it. As long as I can do that I keep my options open.”

“How about dinner tomorrow night?” I suggested to Marella, thinking of how Robin died of an overdose before the new millennium. “There’s a French place not far from your hotel. It’s called the Chambre du Roi.”

“Why not now?”

“I have to talk to a man I know,” I said. “His name is Robin and he always has good information for me.”

“Well, I guess if I have to... I’ll wait.”

There was a short spate of silence then, the kind of quiet that occurs when two strangers feel a passion in full bloom — what else is there to say? They have no history, only a future.

Marella was the wrong woman at the wrong time, but how long could I hope to survive anyway?

The buzzer from downstairs interrupted our communion.

“Somebody’s at the door,” I said.

“That Robin guy?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s the name of that restaurant again?”

“Chambre du Roi. I’ll make the reservation for eight.”

“Don’t stand me up,” she said.

“Not even if I could.”

We ended the call and I just sat there a little stunned by the teenaged hormones flooding my good sense.

The buzzer sounded again.

I walked down the hall to the foyer and pressed the onyx button on the brass-plated intercom.

“Yes?”

“It’s your father, Trot.”