And Sometimes I Wonder About You

32

I got home in the early evening. I was looking forward to the solitude of an empty apartment for the first time in many weeks. It had been a rough few days even if I had made some progress. I still had the business of my dead client, Hiram Stent, to settle up. And there was Hector Laritas to avenge.

“Leonid?” she said as I was making my way toward the dining room.

The voice came from behind, from the door of the little front TV room that we rarely used.

“Katrina.”

She was wearing an off-white silk blouse and a black woolen skirt that came down to her knees — no shoes.

“We’re in here,” she said.

We.

“Come join us,” she said, sober and happy.

My father was sitting in the blue stuffed chair and Katrina returned to her perch on the maroon sofa. It was a tiny room that the kids used to watch TV when they were small. The last time Katrina and I were in there we had passionate sex for the first time in years. That was a few days before she tried to take her life.

“Trot,” my father said.

“Clarence.”

“Your father has been telling me all about the Revolution,” Katrina murmured. She looked much younger than she had in the sanatorium, ten years younger than her actual age. She wore no makeup. Rather the youthfulness came from an inner light.

On the small, child-scarred maple coffee table was a hardback book with no jacket and a bottle of our good port with only one glass.

“What you readin’?” I asked no one in particular.

“First volume of the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci,” my father said.

“Bill said that he was the greatest thinker in the socialist movement,” Katrina told me. “He was arrested by Italian fascists and died in prison.”

I knew Gramsci’s story. My father had drilled the whole socialist pantheon into my brain by the age of eleven. But what interested me was that he wanted my wife to call him Bill; the third name he’d taken on looking for the man he wanted to be.

I sat on the opposite end of the sofa from my wife. She pulled her legs up under her, shifting her body so that half her back was toward me, giving her full attention to my father.

“How’s that boy of yours?” Clarence asked.

“Safe and sound.”

“Twill seemed tense at our dinner,” Katrina said.

“You came home today,” I replied.

“Bill got me just as he promised.”

I had spent so many years hating my father that his charisma was lost on me. I really didn’t see his power except through Katrina’s eyes. But there I saw what brought her home. If Katrina survived it was bound to be because she fell in love again. That was her nature.

I looked from one to the other of the people who were supposed to define the love of my life and saw only distraction and reckless folly.

“I got to get to bed,” I said.

I stood up expecting to spend the rest of the night alone.

“I’ll come with you,” my wife said.

She also stood.

“Good night, Bill,” she bade to my father.

“ ’Night, Clarence,” I added.

I was naked under the blankets with Katrina pushed up against my side wearing a gown that was more like an extra-long red silk T-shirt.

“What’s wrong, darling?” she asked. I could feel her warm breath on my ear.

“Lots.”

“Is it a job?”

“Twill got himself in a mess I can’t even begin to work out and then there’s these two dead men, a missing girl, and a marital job I got to work with. But that’s just a week’s work.”

“So it’s something else?” She traced the swelling on my cheek with a single finger.

“It was like magic you gettin’ up out the bed and coming home.”

“Your father made me laugh,” she explained.

“Are you better then?” I asked. “Because you laughed?”

She laid a hand on my chest and after a minute or so said, “You have a strong heart.”

There was no answer to her declaration and so I gave none.

“I have never been so strong as you,” she continued. “I have always looked for someone or something to, to save me. I wanted money and love and something magical and you were always holding everything up. I could have other men’s children and you loved them. I could go away and you always took me back. Somewhere in all of that I got old and lost myself and couldn’t think of any way out but to die...”

She talked and talked about the ways she failed and my place in her world. At some point the language stopped having specific meaning. I just listened to her tones of love and loss, grief and understanding. There was something wonderful in the sound of her words and I might have wanted to make love to her if I wasn’t dead tired.

In the morning neither of us had budged. Katrina’s hand was still on my chest. She was asleep with a smile on her face. I could feel the heavy beat of my heart under the light touch of her fingers and palm. I wondered if she and my father would become lovers; if I would care at all or kill them both.

But that crossing was many miles ahead; beyond Boston and Washington, DC.

I removed Katrina’s hand gently and got out of the bed silently like a fat serpent uncoiling from a warm den.

I slept again in the quiet car of the Acela train going from Penn Station in New York to South Station, Boston.

Just south of Beacon Hill on Tremont Street across from the public garden was a four-story brick home that I knew from the phone book was the nerve center of the Evangeline Sidney-Gray Foundation and corporation.

I was wearing one of my four identical blue suits and black shoes that shone dully; standing in front of a doorway that had a door with no knob. At seventeen minutes shy of eleven in the morning, with at least a dozen hours of sleep behind me, I looked for a button but there was none. I glanced from side to side for another entrance; all I saw was wall. I chuckled to myself speculating that I’d taken a train to the future where the citizens were hermetically sealed into homes that were self-sufficient and unassailable.

“May I help you?” a man’s voice asked through some kind of amplified medium.

“Ms. Evangeline Sidney-Gray,” I said to the knobless door.

“And you are?”

“Leonid Trotter McGill of New York City.”

“And your business is?”

“...with Ms. Evangeline Sidney-Gray,” I said.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“With destiny and your mistress.”

“I’m sorry but I have no record of that meeting.” A bodiless voice with a reciprocal sense of humor.

“I’m here representing Hiram Stent,” I said boldly.

“Hold on.”

The voice went away or at least stopped communicating and I turned my back on the door. It was a lovely, chilly morning in Boston. There were joggers in the park along with nannies pushing baby-buggies, businessmen and — women striding purposefully among the hoi polloi, and various vagrants looking for anything that might afford them some relief.

A police cruiser slowed down as it drove past. Both cops were looking at me with curious, unfriendly eyes.

“We have no record of any Hiram Stent having business here,” a new voice said.

I turned away from the cops and answered, “But Mr. Stent was employed by a law firm representing Dame Gray’s holding company.”

“What firm is that?”

“Briscoe/Thyme.”

“I’ve never heard of that firm.”

“It is a subsidiary of a London holding company that she in turn holds.”

I quite liked talking to a neutered door. It was a unique experience.

Looking to my right I saw that the police cruiser had parked up the block and that its uniforms were walking my way.

“You might tell your boss that Briscoe/Thyme engaged Hiram Stent to locate Celia Landis and Coco Lombardi, two women, one soul, and a whole lotta grief for us all.”

“Hold on.”

The policemen reached the foot of the stairs I was standing on. They were both white men but, even in Boston, this didn’t necessarily have to be the case. They were tall but I was standing on the topmost stair in front of the impossible door, so I didn’t feel like retaliating.

“Excuse me, sir,” the policeman on the right said. He was hatless and fair.

“Yes, Officer?”

“What’s your business here?”

His partner, who was of equal height but had darker white skin, frowned and put his hand on the butt of his service revolver.

“With Ms. Evangeline Sidney-Gray,” I said jauntily.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Do I need one?”

“She is a very important woman.”

“This is America, Officer, all citizens are of equal importance here.”

“Come down here.”

“Please?”

“What did you say?”

“I was wondering if you were making a request or giving me an order,” I said. That strong heart that Katrina liked so much was about to get me in trouble — again.

“I told you to come down here.”

“Mr. McGill?” a voice said.

Looking around I saw that the door opened like a regular door. I was sure that it was a slider but it had swung inward just like any door with a knob.

The man standing there wore a blue suit of a different species from my own. It was darker and had some kind of highlights, was cut from a cloth that made mine seem like peasant’s wear.

“Yes?” I said to the superior being.

“Ms. Gray will see you.”

“These young men have asked me to go with them,” I countered.

“That’ll be all right, Officers,” the well-dressed, cocoa-colored man said.

I gave an inquiring look to the constabulary. They frowned at me and then shoved off.