The Long Fall

27

The police love it when a suspect, or just somebody they don’t like, is feeling uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter if that person of interest is innocent and doesn’t deserve the abuse. They don’t drop by and apologize the week after the case is cracked and somebody else is proven guilty. Their job is to make people like me feel nauseous and angst-ridden.

The police deal in ulcers and heart attacks, nonspecific neuroses and straight-out paranoia.

That’s why I learned the Buddhist practice of meditation.

After the representatives of the NYPD left my premises I sat me down in the office chair and took in a long slow breath while counting the number “one.” I exhaled, considering the numeral “two,” and went on in that fashion until I made it to “ten.” I started at “one” again, many times, until the counting fell away and all that wasÞng left was a kind of bliss that lasted a little more than half an hour.

I could have gone on like that for much longer but the buzzer sounded again. Rather than shock I felt only a mental nudge. I’d become a brightly colored carp resting in a chilly corner of a shallow Japanese pond. I breathed in through my mouth and looked down into my hall monitors.

Ryman Lucas and Hal Pittman were ugly men. Lucas had a nose, ears, and eyes that belonged on a much larger head. Pittman was just scary. He was always in a rage, and his face expressed that fact with brutal clarity. They were both white, the same height—under six feet but still way taller than I. They wore bad suits—one camel, that was Lucas, and the other a dusky orange.

I stretched languorously, putting my whole upper body into the movement, then pulled my .38 out of the top drawer and sauntered up toward the entrance.

The buzzer had sounded twice more by the time I’d reached the front door. I pulled it open slowly, then showed the thugs my pistol and gestured with the barrel for them to take seats in the receptionist’s visitors’ chairs.

Aura had replaced the confiscated assault chair with a posh brown-leather thing from somewhere in the bowels of the Tesla. It was set to the height I liked, which made me smile as I settled there before my attentive hostages.

“You don’t need no gun, LT,” Pittman said.

“You, on the other hand, need a new tailor,” I replied.

“Com’on, man,” Lucas chided. “We just here ’cause the man told us to be here.”

“In the beginning,” I said, hoping to prime them.

“Huh?” Lucas asked.

“Why are you here?” I felt the air leaving my lungs and the chair holding my weight.

Pittman recited a ten-digit number that began with the primary Chicago area code. A muscle in my left buttock tightened a bit.

I picked up the receiver with my left hand, cradled it against my ear on that side, and entered the numbers spoken.

On the first ring he answered: “Leonid?”

My right butt cheek knew the voice.

“Mr. Vartan.”

“I’m down on the first floor, south side of the building, at the Coffee Exchange.”

“I’ll be right down.”

I thanked Buddha for his breath in my lungs. Without that little bit of an edge I might have done something crazy—like murder the meãe mjusn sitting before me.

“You guys can go,” I said.

“But—” Pittman began.

I leveled the pistol and pulled back the hammer. That got my unwanted guests to their feet and out the door with no more argument.

This action sounds more deadly than it actually was. It was no more violent than slapping a horse on his belly when he has been acting both willful and lazy.

I WAS SURE that the leg-breakers would be waiting for me at the elevator doors on the first floor. When Harris Vartan tells someone to do something he is bound to be obeyed. That’s just the way things work in his world.

I, however, had left that sphere and could think of no better way to articulate that fact than to use the key that Aura had given me to take the utility elevator down to the first floor.

Vartan was sitting at a corner table, sipping his coffee from a porcelain demitasse cup. His lavender suit was somehow understated, while his tie, made from a print of Picasso’s Guernica, spoke of his sophistication.

With silver hair, olive skin, and eyes that at least appeared to be black, Harris Vartan was either the cream or the scum at the top of the container that is New York City. How you saw him depended on where you stood.

“Hello,” I said.

“Leonid,” the dapper advisor to evil said, giving me a minimal smile. “I see that you’ve eluded Tony’s men.”

This would be the only time that Vartan, known in both police and criminal circles as The Diplomat, would mention The Suit’s name.

You had to be on the ball to keep up with Vartan’s patter. He spoke in allusions and metaphors that were too vague ever be useful as evidence in a courtroom.

“I’m out, Mr. Vartan,” I said. “All the way out.”

The fit septuagenarian allowed another hint of mirth to flit across his lips.

No one gets out, his smile said, unless it’s on his back.

I first met Harris Vartan when I was twelve and he was called Ben Tilly. He and my father worked together as labor organizers, but Ben and my old man went on different paths.

“I’m only asking that you do what you do, Leonid,” he said. “After all, a man is defined by his labor.”

A cell phone sitting on the table started vibrating. Vartan paid it no attention.

“A man is also defined,” I said, “by those who work for him—and those whom he works for.”

“Sometimes it’s not so clear who is working for whom.”

“That may be,” I speculated, “except when the individual in question is self-employed.”

“No man is an island,” Vartan lamented, “no king not a man.”

At that point Lucas and Pittman appeared at the open glass doors of the coffee shop. Vartan raised a solitary finger, stopping them in their tracks.

“Do your job, Leonid,” Vartan said as he stood up from the table. “That’s all anyone expects.”

A waiter came up to him, saying, “Did you want your check, sir?”

“My friend is paying.”

Vartan departed with Tony’s dogs at his heels.

While taking out my wallet I wondered what it was my father’s old friend was telling me. Every nuance, including appearing there with Tony’s men, meant that whatever I did, it had to be just right.

Or not.

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