Detour

TWENTY-EIGHT

In the early-morning light Miles’ Brooklyn brownstone looked darker, even forbidding.

The black tower of fairy tales.

Paul had spent the night in his car, parked in a deserted lot underneath the Verrazano Bridge. He’d ruled out going back to his apartment—he was afraid someone might be there waiting for him. He’d woken to a street bum rapping on his window, staring at what must’ve been a mirror image of himself.

Paul peeked in the rearview mirror to check. Yes—a worthy candidate for bumhood. His skin was pasty. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot. His head hurt.

He kept asking himself why?

It felt like he’d entered the bizarro world of the Superman comics he used to read as a kid. Where everything was upside down, inside out. Where people who looked like your friends, weren’t. Where you didn’t have a clue.

A piece of his rational brain kept asking if he could’ve been mistaken. About everything. If he might’ve misunderstood what María said on the phone. If he’d put two and two together and come up with five.

Maybe Miles had hired Pablo. Maybe Miles’ Wednesday night call had simply slipped her mind.

And Moshe? Maybe what he’d whispered to the steroid user had been an innocent crack. Something about the spider—about actuaries with silly phobias.

And those men running after him? Why not, if he’d just clobbered one of their coworkers over the head.

Maybe.

Only he couldn’t forget the way Moshe looked at him through the office door—that smile dripping with chilling insincerity. The way Moshe watched him walk down the hall to the bathroom, as if sighting his prey.

And something else. Miles had gone to move his car but never came back.

Things were beginning to stir in the neighborhood.

People were trickling out of their houses—young, old, even ancient. Unlike Miles, these were people who didn’t dare offend God, even if he did scare off a client or two. The men wore long corkscrew sideburns falling down to their shoulders like Victorian ringlets. They all wore black skullcaps. They must be headed to worship, Paul guessed, suddenly realizing it was Saturday.

Eighteen hours and four days. Dread seized him and refused to let go.

Miles’ house remained conspicuously quiet.

Paul waited twenty minutes—eight o’clock, a reasonable hour to be awake and functioning.

He got out of the car and walked up to the brownstone steps.

He thought he saw a flash of movement through the living room window, slight and insubstantial, like the shadow of a butterfly.

When he knocked on the door, he only had to wait ten seconds before Rachel opened it.

She was dressed in her Saturday best, wig firmly in place under a black wide-brimmed hat, evidently ready to join the throng making its way to prayer. She peered at him quizzically, giving a phantom glance at her watchless wrist.

Yes, it was kind of early for visitors.

“Hello,“ Paul said as normally as he could muster. “Is Miles here?”

It was an obvious question, Rachel’s face seemed to say. Where else would Miles be at eight on a Saturday morning but in his home?

“He’s not feeling well. I was about to take the children to shul, Mr. Breidbart. Was he expecting you?”

Good question, Paul thought.

When Miles asked Rachel who’s there? from behind the door and groggily walked into view without waiting for a response, Paul decided the answer was no.

He wasn’t expecting him.

Miles looked surprised, even shocked. It wouldn’t be amiss to trot out an overused cliché and say he looked as if he’d seen a ghost. He didn’t look like he was feeling well, but the sight of Paul had evidently made him feel worse.

Miles recovered. Maybe his lawyerly instincts took over, reverting to the kind of expression he’d be expected to maintain if one of his clients had just confessed to murder on the stand. Of course Miles didn’t practice trial law—he’d gone into foreign adoptions. And a few other things you maybe didn’t need a license for.

“Paul,” he said, a quasi smile plastered to his face. “I said I’m always available, but this is ridiculous, no?”

Okay, Paul thought, give him credit for grace under fire.

Something was bothering Paul—besides the obvious.

Think.

Miles brought him to Little Odessa to have him killed. Paul had assaulted someone, hijacked a car, and escaped. Moshe would’ve called Miles with that piece of news.

So why was he so shocked at seeing Paul in the flesh and still standing?

“I ran into a little trouble,” Paul said.

Rachel was standing between them like a referee who doesn’t understand the bout’s begun. “You should go upstairs and rest,” she said to Miles with just enough wifely edge to make her point. Business was business, but this was his day off.

“Trouble?” Miles responded, ignoring his wife. “By the way, sorry I was called away yesterday. Did Moshe tell you?”

More to the point, Paul thought, did Moshe tell you? And if not, why? For the fiftieth time that morning, Paul asked himself if it was possible he’d gotten it wrong. He would’ve given anything for that to be the case.

Rachel cleared her throat.

“It’s okay, honey,” Miles said. “I promise that after I talk to Paul here, I’ll take a nice long rest.”

Miles looked like he could use it. He appeared feverish and tired, as if he hadn’t slept in days.

That made two of them.

Rachel clearly wasn’t happy about Paul’s intrusion, but she silently acquiesced. She called her sons.

They slipped through the front door and trooped down the brownstone steps behind their mother with no great enthusiasm.

It was just the two of them now.

Miles said, “Come in.”

He led Paul into the familiar clutter of his office. “So what did Moshe say? Can he help you?”

Paul still desperately wanted to believe Miles.

He wanted to apologize for braining that man with a cement block and for stealing a car.

He wanted to cling to the image of a Miles who’d braved death with him in the Jersey City swamps.

He couldn’t shake Miles’ initial expression at the door. His surprise at Paul’s aliveness. Miles had known what awaited Paul in that warehouse. If Paul was wrong about everything else, he was right about that.

“What’s the matter?” Miles asked, still the friendly lawyer out to help. “You said you ran into trouble. What happened?”

“María called me,” Paul said, letting that simple statement hang there for a moment.

“María?” was all Miles said.

Paul noticed that the telephone Miles had used to call María Consuelo—or not call her—was lying off its hook. Then he remembered something.

Religious Jews weren’t allowed to take calls from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

Orthodox rules.

Miles thought Paul was dead and buried, because Moshe hadn’t been able to call and tell him otherwise.

“That night you picked up the phone and called María?” Paul said. “You didn’t call her. You just pretended to.”

Paul made sure to speak slowly so Miles would be able to grasp the full import of what he was saying—and because it was hard to actually get the words front and center. “If María hadn’t called and told me, I would’ve walked into that office with your friend. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t going to walk out.”

Everything seemed to drain out of Miles’ face. Paul remembered a Thanksgiving Day balloon he’d seen punctured on TV when he was a kid—the huge smiling visage of a cartoon sheriff running into a streetlamp and deflating into something wrinkled and insubstantial.

“You’re an insurance actuary,” Miles said, “right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. What are the odds of you making it out of here alive?”

He was pointing a gun at Paul’s head.

It had suddenly materialized from behind the desk; he must’ve pulled it out of a drawer.

“Let me give you the facts,” Miles said. “It’s how you guys work, right? Facts—then figures. This is an Agram 2000. Croatian made, machine action. It used to belong to an honest-to-God KGB assassin—at least that’s what Moshe told me. They liked the Agram because it’s small enough to stick in your pocket and highly accurate up to twenty feet. More facts. We’re alone—my wife and sons are praying to a just and benevolent God. Also, that funny thing on the end of the barrel? A silencer. No one will hear me shoot you. Okay, now, what would you say the odds are?”

“Poor,” Paul said. And getting poorer by the second, he thought. Miles was having trouble keeping his hand steady—the one gripping the Agram 2000.

“Why?” Paul asked.

For a moment it appeared that Miles hadn’t heard him; he seemed to be listening to something else. He stood up, walked to the window, peeked out through the curtain—all the while managing to keep the gun trained on Paul.

“You see anyone out there?” he asked.

“Anyone? What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? I mean, did you see anyone out there? Anyone not wearing a yarmulke, for example? Never mind. Doesn’t matter.”

He came back behind the desk, sat down.

“Why?” Paul asked again.

“Why? You sound like a child asking one of the four questions. Why do you think?”

“Money.”

“Money. Well, sure, money’s part of it. You ever bet on anything, Paul?”

“What?”

“You ever bet on anything? Guess not. Stupid question. It’s probably against the actuarial code. Remember the 1990 no-huddle Buffalo Bills?”

Paul was having trouble remembering anything except the gun pointed at his head.

“My first colossal blunder. You know you can bet straight up if you’ve got the guts. If you just know. None of those annoying points to deal with. Only you’ve got to lay three to win one. That’s okay. I was sure. I knew. My religion prescribes one ritual bath a year. That was mine.”

“You lost.”

“Oh yeah. Sure you didn’t see anyone out there, Paul? Someone driving by the house maybe?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“You said you bet thirty dollars here and there,” Paul said. “Just to keep things interesting.”

“I fibbed. It’s more interesting when you bet thirty thousand. I’ll tell you how I got started. One day I was sitting and waiting by the phone. You know what for?”

“No.”

“Neither did I. Something. When it rang and I picked it up, the person on the other end said Mr. Goldstein, this is your lucky day. It was a touting service. A Delphic oracle of the ESPN generation. They toss you the first pick for free, just to show what excellent prognosticators they are. They were excellent—that day. I won. I even won again. That’s the problem. You start feeling kind of omnipotent. You forget that’s reserved for the man upstairs. I began practicing a personal form of downside economics. I bet more than I actually had.”

Someone started up a car outside. Miles jerked his head toward the window, gripped the gun with knuckles turned suddenly white.

“It’s just a car,” Paul said.

“Sure. It’s just a car. Everyone walks on Shabbat.” He kept one eye on Paul, and the other on the window, at least until he heard the sound of the car engine slowly drifting down the street.

“Are you expecting someone?”

“Yes. I’m expecting someone. I’m just not sure when I’m expecting them. Sometime soon, I think.”

Miles closed his eyes, wiped his forehead.

“My bookie wasn’t very understanding, Paul. About not having the money. What were the odds he’d say no problem and wipe the slate clean? Come on, Paul . . . numbers?”

“I don’t know.” Paul was continuing to answer him, back and forth and back, as if they were in that car in New Jersey, just shooting the breeze. As if the pet weapon of the Russian KGB weren’t trained on his head. Maybe something brilliant would occur to him.

“You don’t know? Come on. You’ve met him. Moshe, the Russian businessman. By the way, he doesn’t really do a lot of business with Colombians. He doesn’t have to. He does perfectly fine taking bets from me.”

Paul remembered the conversation he’d overheard in the bathroom. Had Wenzel made the vig? one of the men asked. Fucking GNP of Slovakia. And they’d both laughed.

“By the way, you know what the Russians call the Colombians?”

Paul shook his head.

“Amateurs.” He smiled, wiped his forehead again. “Moshe called me his favorite Jewish lawyer back at the warehouse? Because other Jewish lawyers take his money. I’m the exception. I’m the gift that keeps on giving. See, I owed Moshe what I didn’t have. What were the odds I could wiggle out of that one?”

Paul was calculating other odds—trying to gauge the distance to the office door, wondering how long it would take him to make it to the front door of the house if he made it out of the office.

“You’re still here,” Paul said.

“Yeah. I’m still here. You can have smarts and you can have luck. I needed both. I opened my arms and waited for manna from heaven. And I was delivered.”

“How?”

“How? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The gun was still drifting—every so often Miles would notice with a slightly sheepish grin and attempt to re-aim it.

“You don’t want to shoot me,” Paul said.

“I don’t? That’s odd. That’s really odd. You see my neck’s back in the noose again. Not from you—you’re just inconvenient. It’s those assholes with Uzis and kerosene I’m worried about. They looked through my car—they know I’m here. They’re smelling blood. They’re starting to put it together. I can tell. They’re closing in.”

“Put what together?”

“Maybe they are amateurs next to the Russians, but not by much. In the pantheon of assassins, let’s call them lower Division 1. I’m cooked.”

Miles looked cooked. His face was in full flop sweat. Paul couldn’t help wondering if his trigger finger was sweating as well, if it might unintentionally slip.

“I don’t understand,” Paul said.

“I know you don’t.”

“The men in the swamp. You said they were Manuel Riojas’ men. What does he have against you?”

“What are the odds poor little Paul’s ever going to figure that one out? Let’s just say no good deed goes unpunished.”

“What good deed?”

“Okay. No bad deed goes unpunished.”

“I don’t—”

“He who saves one child saves his ass.”

It was as if Miles were speaking in fragments, Paul following a step behind, collecting each piece and desperately trying to glue them together.

“Joanna!” Paul nearly shouted it. Miles had lied about calling María. It suddenly occurred to him that he might have lied about something else. “You said she’s fine. Is she?”

It seemed to take Miles a second to refocus, to concentrate on the question being asked of him and actually answer it. “Sure,” he said. “Under the circumstances. Sorry about your wife and kid. Not my fault—sort of. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Can’t help you there. Wish I could.”

“Miles . . .”

“Uh-uh.” Miles waved his gun at him. “My turn. I’ve got one more question for you. Last one, honest. It’s not even an actuarial question. Ready—pencils out?”

Paul was preparing to launch himself at the door. Or across the desk. Pick one. He had nothing to lose.

“Know what’s the worst sin in Orthodox Judaism—other than marrying a shiksa, of course?”

“No,” Paul said.

“Sure you do.”

Paul made it only halfway across the desk when the bullet exploded out of the barrel. It entered the cranial cavity, which governs memory and social skills, exiting below the neck and embedding itself into the cover of New York State Adoption Statutes. He’d gone toward Miles because he thought it might give him the element of surprise.

He was wrong about that.

Miles had surprised him first.

The worst sin in Orthodox Judaism?

It wasn’t murder.

No.

I promise that after I talk to Paul here, I’ll take a nice long rest, he’d told his wife.

He’d kept his word.