Down the River unto the Sea

14

Walking across from the East Village to the West was a pivotal, even a transitional journey in my life.

My father was a criminal and therefore I had become a cop. I was framed and threatened and so stopped being official and did the work as a private dick. Every step I had taken was an equal and opposite reaction to my father — you might say that it had nothing to do with free will at all.

But me walking down those chilly autumn streets with a man so evil that no crime deterred him meant that I had taken the first steps on a different path, a path that was mine and mine alone.

“I know there’s no way for me to make up for what I was,” Mel was saying as we made our way north on Hudson. The dark brick of the old buildings imparted their gloom onto his lecture and our destination. “I mean, I did it all and it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe if I felt it, I would want to make amends...”

He kept talking, but I wasn’t listening too closely. I knew somewhere that this was new for him too, that he wasn’t the kind of guy who told you anything unless it was either absolutely necessary or a lie. Melquarth, maybe for the first time, was thinking out loud, while I remembered my cell in solitary and how my enemies had broken me, made me cower like a dog.

“There it is,” I said after six long blocks.

The Liberté Café was on the east side of Hudson, having big windows and outside tables that only a few people used. It was mainly an overpriced pastry shop that made complex coffees and little sandwiches that pretended to be French.

“Can I help you?” a young caramel-colored woman asked. She had big freckles flanking her broad nose and a space between her front teeth.

“How about that table there?” I suggested.

“Sure. I’ll get Juan to bring your menus.”

I could see that Mel would have preferred a table tucked away behind the counter, but I knew that such seating would make us look suspicious.

Juan was a smallish bronze-skinned man with a debonair mustache and eyes that had somewhere else to be.

“I’ll have the prosciutto on a baguette and a green tea latte,” I told the young man when he asked the floor for my order.

“Coffee, black, with some bread,” Mel said.

When Juan went away Mel asked, “So what do you want with this guy?” referring to Stuart Braun.

“Have you ever met him?”

“No, but I knew a dude in Q that Braun got out from under a murder one charge.”

“Braun was in California?”

“No. But the guy had killed somebody in New York and then another man in Sacramento. California extradited and convicted him after Braun did his magic out here.”

“I don’t want to say why I’m looking into him quite yet,” I said.

“It’s your dollar.”

I was beginning to like my satanic sidekick.

“So what’s your story, Mel? I mean the real deal.”

He looked at me. His eyes were truly dead, but regardless of that there was gratitude in his stare.

“Prison psychiatrist says that I have borderline personality disorder with intermittent psychotic breaks that both relieve the pressure of unconscious guilt and make me dangerous.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Don’t it? I asked the woman, if I was that far gone why was I in prison and not in some mental facility?”

“What did she say?” I asked, looking up to see a trio of unlikely customers walk through the glass door. The big men all wore jeans, cotton sports jackets, and patterned shirts of various styles.

“That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil,” Mel said, answering my question. “She said in the modern world a man who beats his own head against the wall is crazy but the guy slams somebody else’s head is criminal.”

“Three guys walked in,” I said.

“I see ’em in the mirror.”

They were talking to the sweet-skinned freckled girl.

“The fat one in the light jacket is a guy named Porker,” Mel added. “I don’t think he knows me. I was supposed to kill him this one time, but his girlfriend decided that she felt sorry for his wife and gave me my fifty percent kill fee.”

The men were looking around. Finally they decided on the partially concealed table that Mel coveted.

When they were settled, shy-eyed Juan went over to take their orders.

“So your story is a prison psych putting a textbook diagnosis on your actions?” I asked, telling Mel that we were just going to watch and wait.

“No. I was just giving you the official answer. You know that’s how most people know everybody else. They read it in a newspaper ad or maybe a letter from home.”

“So what’s the real answer?”

“My mother was a Catholic girl. From the age of three she went with her mother to church every Wednesday and Sunday. When she was nine she pledged her life to Jesus Christ and each and every word in a single book.

“Then one night, when she thought she was alone in the cathedral, a man dragged her into the confession box and raped her. She was barely a teenager and right there in the church too. That shit warped her brain.

“Her mother and father ordered her to get an abortion, but she told them that that would be against God. They kicked her out the house and she lived in a Catholic dormitory, where she gave birth, named me after the demon, and never, ever showed me any love.

“I was a duty like Job’s trial for her. She housed me and fed me and told me every day that I was the son of evil.”

I looked into Mel’s dead eyes, thinking that my life might not have been as bad as I thought.

“You know Porker’s real name?” I asked.

“I forget, but I know where to get it.”

After that we dallied over our drinks and food. Mel had a vast range of knowledge that had nothing to do with crime. He knew quite a bit about evolution. He told me that his greatest wish, when he was a child, was to change into something different; like wolves had become dogs or dinosaurs birds.

When my watch said 10:37 the three thugs paid their bill, got up, and left. They hadn’t seen a man with a red flower in his lapel. Stuart Braun wasn’t there either.

“I guess we can go too,” I said maybe half an hour after Porker and his crew were gone.

Outside the restaurant Mel said, “I killed the motherfucker.”

The old me would have been on the alert for a confession, but I had already crossed over that line in the East Village.

“Who?”

“My father. I asked around until I heard about a guy from my mother’s old neighborhood who had gone down for rape a few times. I met him in a bar and, after a whole lotta rye, he told me about a thirteen-year-old girl he raped in a confession box. He said that was the sweetest nut he ever had.

“A little later on I made some excuse to get mad and hit him in the teeth. I wiped some’a the blood up with a handkerchief and left him on the street.

“The DNA lab identified him as my father and I met up with him again. He’d been so drunk that he didn’t remember gettin’ knocked out. I took him to this abandoned house in the Bronx and put all kinds of pain to his ass. When he was dead I poured seventeen gallons of sulfuric acid into a big ole bathtub and that motherfucker was gone from the world. It was like he never even existed.”

“Because he raped your mother?” I had to ask.

“Because he made me and made me what I am and didn’t even know it. And on top of that he wouldn’t have given a damn even if I told him.”