The Long Fall

19

The online version of the New York Times had a picture of Roger Brown on the first page of the metro section: a dark and handsome face with doubting eyes. The scar on his right cheekbone reminded me of my handsome son. Roger’s smile was of the unconscious variety, the kind of grin that makes a woman think he’d be attentive, if a little mischievous.

Roger had lived in a good building in the West Village, where murders rarely happened, so there was a splash of sorts. The journalist questioned neighbors and they all testified to how shocked they were.

“He was a nice man,” Doris Diederrot, who lived on the fifth floor, said, “always helpful and friendly.”

“I saw him coming home from the Gristedes just yesterday,” Bob Hahn, the super, said. “He was a very nice, very courteous young man.”

Fear filled the streets of the Village, if you were to believe the copy.

Somewhere around eleven o’clock, two nights before, someone had broken the lock on the front door of the building. There was no nighttime doorman. The assailant or assailants went to the sixth-floor apartment, probably knocked, gained entry, and then beat and strangled the thirty-four-year-old investment advisor to death. No one heard anything. No one saw the attackers leave the building.

I had broken into a nighttime building. I had climbed up and down the back stairs, to and from a murder scene.

Exhaustion from the sleepless night before hit me like a revelation. I got to my feet, staggered across the room, and fell on my hard-cushioned Swedish sofa. I was asleep before my body came to rest.

NO FIRE OR FALLING in that dream. I was in a vast flower garden at the height of the blooming season. Every kind of rose and peony, orchid and dahlia filled the field with their brilliance and scents. Huge and deadly Japanese hornets buzzed among the blossoms. Broad-headed scaly-skinned serpents coiled through the soil at my feet. There were vultures overhead and thorns aplenty but I passed through without a bite, stab, or sting.

Around the perimeter of this twisted Eden was a barbed-wire fence. Every ten feet or so, on the other side of the fence, an armed uniformed guard stood at attention. I wondered if they were set there to keep the unsuspecting public out or to protect the obvious riches from plunderers.

The giant hornets’ humming was deep and sonorous. They hovered, oblivious to my presence. There seemed to be a message for me in all this profusion and threat. I couldn’t discern the meaning, but I knew that if I suddenly understood, the creatures would become aware of me and the soldiers would get me in their sights.

So I took long steady breaths and waited for some sign. I appreciated the beauty not only of the flora but also the loveliness of the deadly bees and fanged snakes, the cut of the soldiers’ uniforms and the effortless glide of vultures riding on thermals overhead.

WHEN I OPENED my eyes Aura was sitting in the blue chair six inches from me. Her smile said that she was happy to see me coming awake.

“I’m sorry I let that cop in but—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

As I sat up a groan escaped my throat that spoke of all my fifty-three years.

“He could have gotten every building inspector in the city down here if I didn’t let him in,” Aura said, unable to stem the excuse.

“You’d think so, but Kitteridge doesn’t work like that. He might be the only truly honest cop in the whole city. Imagine that? One clean cop and his major goal in life is putting my ass behind bars.”

“He wanted the combination to the inner door but I told him I didn’t have it,” she said.

Aura and Twill were the only ones who knew the access code to my inner doors.

“Don’t worry, babe. Tryin’ to stop the law is like holding back the rain. It’s what they call an exercise in futility. If you’d made him wait in the hall he would have probably taken it out on me.”

“What does he want?” she asked, her bronze visage somber yet calm. It wasn’t what an aficionado would call beautiful, but still it was the kind of face that gave you hope.

I told her everything, about my search for the four young men and the three ensuing deaths. Talking to Aura was like opening a vein.

The first thing you learned in my line of business was that you never give up any information that you don’t absolutely have to. Katrina knew nothing about my business. But Aura represented a whole new movement in my life. The time I spent with her was painfully honest. I never lied, except about my recurring dream. Sometimes, when something was just too secret to share, I’d say, “I can’t talk about that, babe. So please don’t as£pler lk me.”

“WHAT ABOUT THE dream?” she asked after I’d told her about coming upon the corpse of Norman Fell.

Her question had a two-tiered design. First, she was telling me that she accepted my story and was on my side. Secondly, since I seemed to have let her deeper into my life, she wanted to know more.

“I’m in a building,” I said, relieved to finally put the nightmare into words. “It’s burning, burning, and I’m running from room to room. I think that maybe I’m the last man left alive but that doesn’t matter because soon I’ll be dead, too . . .” I told her about the window and the long fall. “It’s like my life is one long tumble off the side of a mountain. I’m falling through the air and certain to die. There’s no way that I can be saved. No cushion or twist or turn.”

Aura took one of my hands in hers and squeezed.

“I love you, Leonid McGill.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“You don’t know what love is?”

“Maybe I do, maybe not. But what I don’t understand is how you can listen to all this and still have any feelings for me whatsoever. I left you for another woman. I caused the deaths of at least two men. And you know I’ve done much worse in years gone by.”

Aura’s smile was in another place than the one I was addressing. She nodded at something, not what I’d said, and then waited as this unspoken knowledge settled around us.

She took my other hand, leaned forward, and kissed my lips lightly.

“You are a man on the road,” she told me.

“What does that mean?”

“My father murdered many men back in his country. But I would have still loved him if only he could face what he had done. Instead he lied and blamed others for his crimes. He ran off the road, out of the sun. But you are right out there in the light of day. That’s all I want from my man.”

Her man.

I took in a breath but it didn’t work. I took in another.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Twenty after one.”

“In the afternoon?”

Aura nodded and gave me that enigmatic smile.

“I’ve been sleepin’ since nine?”

She nodde£e=">

“How long have you been here?”

“I came up a little while after the policeman left,” she said. “At first I just wanted to make sure that you were okay. Then I stayed to watch over you while you got some rest.”

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