And Sometimes I Wonder About You

4

Marella Herzog’s cab pulled away leaving me a little stunned. My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight. It was this unusually calm and yet powerful beat that allowed me to go back into Penn Station. I guess I felt somewhat invulnerable and unconcerned with consequences or danger.

The main hall of the transportation hub was a little more frenetic than usual; like an ant colony that had just perceived some kind of physical threat. I counted nine police uniforms and actually saw the wheeled gurney that carried our unconscious attacker toward the front exit.

I was taking a greater chance than most civilians because half the NYPD had at least passing familiarity with my face. In my younger days I had been the danger. I was a private investigator who only worked for underworld figures setting up other crooks for their crimes. I had relinquished my evil ways but the police never forget and rarely forgive, so cops who weren’t even out of high school when I was active knew my mug shot.

I wasn’t worried because the police would have assumed that our attacker’s attacker had fled. Also I wasn’t going to be in the area of their ad hoc investigation for more than thirty seconds.

At the bottom of the escalator I took a hard left past the public toilets, through a short hall that housed a newsstand and a doughnut shop, and then down a concrete stairway into the long hall that led to the station’s commuter trains.

The lower-level arcade was a triple-wide passage with dozens of shops selling everything from orange pop to used books. If you were on your way out of the city, headed for some suburban home, you could get whatever you needed on that unnamed, underground, two-block-long street.

Strolling among the crowd, I considered the fight I’d just had along with the concept of organized sport. One day elevator fighting might become a recognized competition. The walls, floor, and ceiling would be made from transparent, steel-hard plastic and its audience mostly young and dissatisfied. The gladiators might enter the car on the first floor and travel upward, stopping at each stage to take on another challenger. The height of the ride would be the classification of the fighter, and anyone who made it to the top would be champion.

Why not?

Halfway down the arcade was an upscale coffee shop named Cheep’s. There was no logo for the espresso joint so I never knew if the name came from the false promise of lower prices or the cry of a small bird. At any rate, Cheep’s had two young black women and an older black man taking orders and serving overpriced coffee in paper cups. There were four small tables in the recess, three of which were most often untenanted because commuters were defined by forward motion, not sitting and sipping in a man-made hole.

One small round table had a regular occupant, however — a man known to most as the Professor. An older and diminutive white man, the Professor always wears a loose-fitting, threadbare suit, the color of dust. His cotton T-shirt is invariably navy and his back forever against the wall. The Professor is one of the many sources I go to to find out what’s happening in my town.

I got on line for coffee, watching the passageway peripherally. A few cops walked down looking for someone to raise his hand and say, “I did it. I beat up the guy holding the knife and then came down here to hide.”

“Can I help you, mistah?” the young woman who took orders asked. Her straightened hair was maybe two feet long and equal parts pink, turquoise, and dark brown. She had golden pins through either side of her upper lip and eyes that had seen things.

“Large coffee,” I said. “Dark roast.”

For some reason my order, or its delivery, made her smile. As had been its purpose since humans became a species, the smile socialized me.

“How are you today?” I asked.

“Rather be out there with you, Mr. McGill.”

My reaction to being recognized was twofold. First I lost the feeling of invulnerability. She had pierced my imagined force field with just a few words. Then I wondered who she was. Maybe twenty and a few pounds over the limit imposed by American TV, movies, and fashion magazines...

“Sherry, right?” I said. “Shelly’s friend.”

“That’s good,” she complimented. “I was only over at your house one time.”

“Can you guys hurry it up,” a man’s voice said from behind. “Some people have trains to catch.”

I turned around, the full 180 degrees. He was, of course, a few inches taller, what passes for white, and younger than me by two decades. But that wasn’t enough. I’d lost my immunity to injury but my super strength was solidly in place. The gray-suited man gazed at me with his light brown eyes and then looked away.

When I turned back, my coffee was there in front of me, Sherry smiling over it.

“How much I owe you?”

“This one’s on the house,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“If you come back sometime in the morning it won’t be so busy.”

“I will,” I said and then moved to the side.

I had never been flirted with by one of my daughter’s friends. At most other times I’d have probably shrugged it off, but Marella’s explosive intrusion had torn up the tracks of my regular route and I was now on foot in unfamiliar territory.

“Professor,” I said, standing at his table.

“Leonid,” he answered in a soft, sophisticated tone of erudition. “How are you?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “I was passing through and thought I’d drop by and say hello.”

“Sit down. Drink your coffee.”

I lowered into the chair at his side so that I could see out and see him at the same time.

“How are you?” the Professor asked again.

“My wife tried to commit suicide a few months back,” I said. “Dealing with her, I may have gone off orbit a bit.”

The Professor was one of the select few whose vision I trusted. There are all kinds of categories in the streetwise intelligence business. There was Sweet Lemon Charles, who had given up the Life for poetry but still wandered the old streets and passed rumors that most likely had roots in reality. Alphonse Rinaldo was the most powerful man in city government and yet he had no official post. You only went to Rinaldo for Category 5 difficulties. Luke Nye had specific information on criminals only.

But the Professor was another thing completely. Born Drake Imago, he was once an Ivy League philosophy professor teaching in the gulfs between Hegel and Marx, Marx and the Frankfurt School, the Frankfurt School and certain political activists in ’60s European and American politics. He’d had a rivalry with another professor, a man named Hendricks, for years. Hendricks always stayed ahead of the Professor, getting the bigger grants, awards, and more prestigious accolades.

One day the Professor came home to find Hendricks in flagrante delicto with his wife. After calling the police, the Professor sat down to his manual typewriter and, with his hands still wet with the blood of his victims, typed a confession starting with the first crime committed against him by Hendricks: when he stole the Professor’s idea about Obfuscative Language and the Tyranny of Philosophy.

Receiving a life sentence, the Professor spent twelve years in maximum security — this because he showed no remorse for the brutality of his crime. During the first eighteen months he’d been beaten, raped, slashed, nearly starved to death by criminals that stole his food, and driven temporarily insane by the sights, sounds, and smells of nonstop human distress. That, as he is happy to tell all and sundry, was his basic education.

Then he met a young man named Bronk. When the Professor was being beset by a rat-faced con with tattoos all around the edges of his face, Bronk saved him and asked if he could write down what Bronk felt. Completely illiterate, Bronk had committed a string of armed robberies and was then incarcerated without having the chance to communicate with his family. His mother lived in the hills of Kentucky and didn’t have a phone. The Professor sat down with Bronk and after a series of twelve questions he crafted a letter that expressed things that Bronk had not even realized he felt.

For the next ten and a half years Bronk and the Professor were cellmates, bosom buddies, and maybe even lovers. No one bothered the Professor after that, and he became a fount of information and advice for the gen pop of the maximum security prison.

“I’m sorry,” the Professor said about my wife — Katrina. “How’s she doing now?”

“Okay. All right. I have her in a sanatorium because she’s still a little loopy.”

The old man gave a sad smile and sipped his coffee.

You go to Sweet Lemon, Rinaldo, or Luke Nye when you want more or less specific help. The Professor is a thinker and a witness to the world whose insights change the lenses of perception.

If an ex-con comes to him he might have a line on a legitimate day job or maybe a connection for something a little less savory. If you find yourself at a crossroads in life he’s the traffic light. And if you just drop by... who knows? The Professor’s eyes are always open, collecting data like a water filter catching all the impurities the seven seas have to offer.

“Got anything for me, Drake?” I asked.

“I’ve seen your son Twilliam walking back and forth down here a few times,” he said. “He was wearing tattered blue jeans and a T-shirt with a grease stain on the back hem.”

“Twill was?”

“He was indeed.”

I finished my coffee, put a twenty-dollar bill down on the table, and bid the educated killer good-bye.