And Sometimes I Wonder About You

35

Four years ago that block on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx wasn’t even a “neighborhood in transition.” Most of the houses and small apartment buildings were abandoned or lived in by squatters. Back then the four-story house I was going to had two residents: Luke Nye, who passed for a black man but who actually looked to be a direct descendant of the moray eel, and Johnny Nightly, a midnight-colored enforcer who might have at one time been mistaken for Nat King Cole’s younger, more handsome brother.

That was then.

Today Luke’s building houses eight apartments, six of which are inhabited by Hispanic ladies and their children, and maybe a temporary man or two; one unit for Luke and another for Johnny.

The basement of Luke’s place was his main source of income: a huge room that housed three regulation-sized pool tables. It was here that the best players in the world came to compete. Johnny rented the room for anything from ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars a night, and also ran book for people around the world who both watched and bet on the contests.

But now Luke’s neighborhood was becoming gentrified. The billionaires’ and multimillionaires’ colonization of the island of Manhattan had driven the middle classes out to Brooklyn, Queens, and even to the Grand Concourse. Luke bought buildings up and down the block, selling to would-be homeowners who wouldn’t cause him trouble.

Other than real estate, Luke’s side business was information. He would, for a thousand-dollar fee, answer solitary questions for people he trusted. Luke knew a great deal about the underworld from New York to New Mexico and all the way to New Delhi.

I was one of those special customers to whom Luke deigned to sell.

The building had a front door but I rarely approached it. My usual route was a concrete path that led around the back, arriving at a weatherworn door that was four steps down from ground level. I could have knocked but, as at Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s door in Boston, there was no need. I waited for maybe a minute and the door opened inward.

Asha Graham stood there. Slender and brown, disdainful and quite lovely, Asha wore an emerald dress that came down around her calves. She had run with half a dozen gangsters, gamblers, and gunmen over the past ten or twelve years; she’d outlived them one at a time. After a while bad men would avoid Asha whenever she came around. They could face a beating or bullet because there was some chance they might survive those encounters, but Asha was a death sentence and no sex in the world was worth that.

The thirty-something beauty might have become an old maid if not for Luke. He had seen everyone around him perish before their time. He believed in curses of course, all gamblers did, but he felt that his juju was at least as strong as Ms. Graham’s.

“Mr. McGill,” she said. It wasn’t quite a friendly greeting. Asha wasn’t the kind of woman to smile and fawn; she came from the guffaw and fuck, drink yourself senseless and die finishing school for young women.

“Asha.”

“You here for Luke or Johnny?”

“Can I have both?”

Asha let go of the slightest of smiles and stood to the side. I went past her, going down twelve more steps into one of the most important pool rooms in the world. Past the three tables was a sitting area with three red sofas set in a triangle about a circular table with a top made from a single piece of lapis lazuli. The room was bright because there was no game. There was a bottle of gin and a teapot on the blue table.

“LT,” Luke said, rising up from a sofa. He spent most of his time in the pool room. That was his life now that he had given up pimping, stealing, dealing, and murder-for-hire.

“Luke,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.

“Leonid,” Johnny Nightly said. He also rose and shook my hand.

When we were all seated Luke asked, “Who can do what for you today, LT?”

“The who is you,” I said, “and the what is two names. An underground Fagin wannabe named Jones and a guy who’s probably in the life named Paulie DeGeorges.”

That was one of the few times I saw a moment of hesitation in Luke’s face.

“DeGeorges,” he said, pondering. “What’s his thing?”

“I’m not sure. There’s a girl way out of her depth that has stolen something that’s very valuable and maybe important for other reasons. She’s probably hoping to use this guy to help her work it through. But I really don’t know anything about him except for the name and that the one time anybody saw him he was wearing a bow tie.”

Luke thought for a moment more and then went to an oak wall at the back of the room. There he slid a panel aside and pulled out an unusual contraption. The greater part of the machine looked like an old-fashioned complex shortwave radio. This was attached to a very ordinary, if outdated, black rotary phone. He set a few dials on the radio portion of the machine, the phone gave a short burp of its ring, and then Luke raised the receiver, dialed six numbers, and, after a forty-five-second wait, said, very clearly, “Paulie DeGeorges.”

He then hung up the phone and returned to a red sofa next to Asha. I had a couch to myself and Johnny occupied the other.

“Tea or gin, Mr. McGill?” Asha asked.

“Better give him tea,” Luke suggested. “With the kinda questions he’s askin’ he’s gonna need all his wits.”

While Asha poured my English Breakfast, Luke continued, “If you can forget Jones, that would be your best option; maybe your only one. He the baddest motherfucker in three states. Slick as oil and deadly as a volcanic eruption. Only man I ever heard of could make somebody commit suicide rather than go up against him.”

“What’s his thing?” I asked, to see if there was more than what Twill and his clients knew.

“Children,” Luke said simply. “The greatest weakness of any species is its young. If they don’t survive, the story is over. If they do, they will bury us.”

“In English, Luke.”

“He got children doin’ his work. They steal for him, prostitute for him, and they will kill, too. He brings ’em in and makes them his creatures. If they cross him they die. If they talk it don’t matter because they don’t really know nuthin’. Nobody knows his name and he’s got dirt on at least a few people in every court, precinct, and government office. Nobody knows what he looks like, or where he calls home. If I was to make book on it I’d say that he was once a part of the juvenile protection department. From there he found out how to use children. But no one knows.”

“No way to beat him?” I asked the man who many believed had all the answers.

“Get somebody in close,” Luke speculated. “Close enough to kill him and brave enough to die. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy trusts anybody with his secrets, so a suicide run would end whatever problem it was that somebody had.”

I was hoping that Twill hadn’t come up with the same conclusion.

The rotary phone rang once, then the sounds of a dot-matrix printer started up. After maybe eight minutes the sounds stopped and Johnny went to the back wall, pulled out a drawer, and removed half a dozen sheets of paper. He glanced through them and then handed the sheets to Luke. Without reading the contents he passed the pages on to me.

I folded the papers and put them in my inside breast pocket.

“What is that?” I said, gesturing at the apparatus.

“That is to me what I am to you,” Luke said.

“What do I owe?”

“The same,” he said. “Always the same. One thousand dollars.”

“What about for Jones?”

“I hand out death notices for free. Public service, you know.”

“LT,” he called.

I had almost made it to the sidewalk in front of Luke Nye’s house.

I turned and waited for Johnny to reach me.

“You need some help on this, man?” he asked.

I took a moment to consider the offer. Johnny was long and lean, powerful and deadly. He was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when the shit came down. I had three deadly forces to contend with, and only two hands. Luke was right when he said that our children are our greatest weakness. Twill was my son and I felt vulnerable for him.

But Johnny almost died the time before last when I needed his help.

“No, Johnny,” I said. “I got this one covered.”