The Long Fall

25

Oh my God. Oh my God,” Katrina chanted again and again, daubing my head with a damp towel. “It’s so terrible. Why would a man hit you like that? How could someone be like this?”

It’s a disheartening feeling when you can’t stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away. There hadn’t been love between Katrina and me for a dozen years at least, and before that the passion was sporadic at best.

It would have been impossible to explain in a court of law, or in a marriage counselor’s office, how I believed that every gesture she made, every comment that came from her lips, was considered before its fabrication. Katrina had made herself into the image of a loving wife because she had tried her best to leave and the ground had fallen out from underneath her.

Sometimes I wondered how my life ended up in that sad configuration. How could I be the father to other men’s children, the life-partner of a woman who believed that wealth and beauty somehow combined to make up love?

I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall.

“Leonid?” Katrina said in a tone that made me think she’d called to me more than once.

“Yeah?”

“Are you insured?”

Every now and then even my wife could say something to make me laugh.

I AWOKE AT five the next morning, as usual. I’ve always been a nervous sleeper, an early riser, and prone to naps.

After two cups of extra-strong press-pot French roast I honed my thoughts down to the trouble I was facing. I needed to extricate myself, but before I could do that I had to understand the nature of the mess that I was in.

There were plenty of clues: the four men I had searched out, Norman Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), and the as-yet-nameless person who hired him. The client’s initials, VM or BH, was something—but not much. Even at the moment of his death, when he was confessing to me, Fell had been cagey. The illiterate had made sure not to put a gender on the employer that he was supposedly betraying. I didn’t know if it was a man or woman who’d hired him.

There was also Willie Sanderson, and maybe a kid who died named Thom “Smiles” Paxton.

Someone wanted these low-rent young men killed, and then, to cover their tracks, Norman Fell was destined to die. I didn’t know if I had always been on the hit list or if maybe Sanderson had heard him talking to me and then had been sent to shut my mouth, too.

Sanderson had to be a hired killer—of that much I was almost certain.

But who would want four low-life young men killed? Who’d pay a man’s bail to murder him? The scenario was simple, it just didn’t make sense, like a live cat sealed in a glass globe, or the United States declaring peace.

I WENT TO the den and got online, looking for some event that would hold the four targets together at the time Fell’s client’s son last saw them. That was Óthe>I in early September 1991.

That fall was a very interesting moment in modern American history. The dictatorship of the proletariat was disintegrating in Russia. Gorbachev and Yeltsin made their move to take power from the Soviet congress. The Baltic nations gained their independence and the CIA was looking for a new way to justify its existence.

Out of a thousand executions over the previous fifty years, for the first time a white man was executed for murdering a black man. The Republicans and Democrats were battling over Clarence Thomas’s bid for a seat on the Supreme Court. President de Klerk was having a hard time trying to democratize South Africa while holding back power for his white brothers.

Frank Capra died.

The country was in the midst of a recession, and the political and social world was spinning off its axis, though no one knew in what direction it would go.

A lot was happening but nothing about the four teenagers that I had found for Fell.

Thom Paxton had died that year. I found the entry on the ninety-seventh page delivered by my Bug-designed search engine. It was an article in Newsday when Newsday was a city paper. The young man had died of a broken neck incurred when he fell from a high girder. He and some unnamed friends were trespassing on the site and there was some evidence that the victim was intoxicated.

It was a solid clue, only it would have been better if his last name started with an M or an H as did Fell’s client’s. I tried to find out more about young Thom, who, the article said, was seventeen, but there was nothing more to fetch.

AS LONG AS I was online I looked through my e-mails. I got offers to enhance my penis size and to get rich off of diamonds in South Africa, a holler from a girl named Shirl who swore she could get me out of the funk men my age experience, and a missive, replete with attachments, from Tiny “Bug” Bateman.

Mardi Bitterman had published a story in an online teen magazine about a suicide pact between two sisters who lived in Iraq. The fictionalized children were being tortured for some reason, and the only way they could defend themselves was to die. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Mardi hadn’t also spent many hours browsing sites that claimed to have information on exotic poisons derived from household ingredients.

The father, Leslie, didn’t have anything nearly so dramatic in his digital background, but there was a shadow there. He received a regular certified package that was arranged through a website, which he accessed through his office account, some outfit called Phil’s Olde Tyme Almanack. Bug couldn’t find any other reference to the business, nor could he identify any other customers.

He was sure about the Bitterman address. Which was maybe fifteen blocks from our place.

“I’m drawing a blank on this one, LT,” Bug wrote.

Óe.

<

I turned off the machine and left the apartment before anyone else was up.

AURA WAS WAITING in the antechamber of my office, a much lovelier sight than Carson Kitteridge or The Suit.

“Hey, babe,” I said as nonchalant as I could with a cockroach-sized bump on my left temple.

She put her arms around me and I relented, feeling the air fill my lungs and the full weight of my body evenly distributed on the soles of my feet.

“I wanted to call you,” she whispered in my ear.

“I know.”

“You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

“I didn’t hit myself in the head.”

She leaned back and stared into my face. There was no plan in her heart, no goal she was reaching for. Aura liked being in my presence. She filled my life with a knowledge and a confidence that I’d never known before. And that was because I tried my best not to lie her, and to never misrepresent who I was.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“I’m going into my office and you’re going up to yours,” I said. “For now that’s all we can do.”

“Theda misses you, and so does Trini.”

Trini was a Tibetan spaniel, and Theda was a precocious twelve-year-old whom Aura adopted when her best friend, Nancy, Theda’s mother, died. Twill dropped by their house now and again because they’d gotten to know each other while Katrina was off with Banker Zool.

“I miss them, too,” I said, disentangling myself.

“Call me?” she said before going out the door.

THE RECEPTION AREA of my office had been cleaned up. Even the holes in the wall were spackled and awaiting a new coat of paint. Aura took care of me as best she could. If I was a good guy I would have told her not to wait, to find a new man who deserved her attention. And I wouldn’t have said it because there was no chance of us getting back together. Katrina could leave at any moment. The problem was that I might, one day soon, find myself free and available. But then what? Would she end up murdered just for being my friend, as had Gert Longman? Would she end up snarling at me as she died, like that girl calling herself Karmen Brown had done?

AFTER APPRECIATING THE job well done and castigating myself for not being able to live without hope, I went through to my office and lay down on the sofa. There were fires burning all around me, but I slept long and hard.

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