Down the River unto the Sea

13

Aja was gone by 6:30. I dressed and was ready for the night by 7:00.

The last talk I had with my daughter had put the trouble with Monica to bed, but I forgot, as most men are wont to do, that what happens to me is not necessarily up to me.

Upon exiting the door onto Montague Street I heard a man shout, “Oliver!”

The street was crowded with shoppers beginning to think about dinner and Christmas and who felt that they should be outside before the bite of winter sent them home for the season.

A group of young men and women, mostly black, were fooling around near the curb. From around the twenty-something revelers came Coleman Tesserat, Monica’s boy-toy husband. He was dressed for jogging with the hood down. The sweat suit was yellow with dark blue or black piping.

I had a short-nosed .45 revolver in my windbreaker pocket, but that hardly seemed necessary. Later that night things might be different.

“Coleman,” I said.

A sky-blue-haired black girl watched us. She heard the threat, as I had, in Coleman’s voice.

“What did you say to Monica?” he demanded.

“Why you wanna ask me that and you already know?”

Coleman got to within twenty-four inches of me. He was a black belt in some Eastern exercise system and thought that taught him how to defend himself.

“I asked you a question,” he said with all the confidence of the dead.

I said, “You already know.”

The blue-haired girl touched a young man’s shoulder.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Coleman was saying.

“If that was true,” I said, still looking at the girl, “you wouldn’t be in my face.”

“I could kick your ass right here,” Coleman warned.

“In front of witnesses?” I said innocently. “And me with my hands at my side.”

“Stay out of my business,” he said, understanding that he’d made a tactical error confronting me like that.

“Did your wife tell you why I said I’d look into you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“She called a man I was investigating. If he was of another nature I might be dead. She was fucking with me for no reason. I just pushed back. And the next time you come at me, be ready to kill, because I won’t stop coming till it’s over.”

I walked away with all kinds of nonsense racing through my body and mind.

Teenage hormones sang in my heart and sinews because I wanted to beat Monica’s new husband to pulp. Under that feeling was the revelation that my preoccupation with the opposite sex had returned. I knew this when I saw Blue-hair looking at me.

I was ready.

There’s an illegal private club on Avenue D down near Houston. It takes up the three-level subbasement of a huge public housing project.

You push the button for apartment 1A and the buzzer lets you in. You come to the door and say a name. If they like the name, you go through the door and down some stairs, coming to another door. This opens to a very large room that is quiet and usually half-filled with men and women who need privacy on the level of a secret society. There are comfortable chairs and tables, walls lined with bookshelves, and servers wearing either tuxedos or miniskirts.

The residents of that building never complain because the owners of the nameless club have at least three security people watching the entrance at all times. There’s no mugging, drug dealing, or prostitution above the basement — ever.

I had not been to the club before, but I knew of it.

“Looking for Mel?” asked a lovely blond black young woman standing behind the cast-iron podium at the bottom of the stairs. She wore a little black dress, black hose, and a microchain silver necklace that had a red stone as its jewel.

“Yes, I am.”

She took me through a doorway behind the podium, down a slender hallway, to another flight of stairs that led to another large room with fewer occupants.

“At the opposite wall,” she said.

I saw Melquarth Frost waving at me from the place the hostess indicated. I couldn’t help feeling that I was actually about to make a deal with the devil.

He stood up when I approached the table. I got the impression that this was a show of great deference. We shook hands. His powerful paw felt like a winter glove filled with concrete.

“Mr. Frost.”

“King — I got your text. Did they let you in like I said?”

“They sure did.”

We sat and appreciated each other a moment. He wore a lemon-colored suit that was loose but hung well. The shirt was lapis replete with errant silver and golden threads weaving through. I wore a felt-lined brown trench coat, black trousers, and black leather shoes with rubber soles.

I had thirteen years on the force, six of those as a detective, and Frost was the most dangerous criminal I had ever come across. Our few meetings had convinced me that he felt in my debt, though we had never discussed this obligation after his first visit to my office.

We might have been about to start speaking, when a mid-height, slump-shouldered man wearing a white jacket and black pants walked up to the small round table.

“Mel,” the man said in a voice that was hard and clear.

“Ork.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Nobody for you to worry about.”

“A guy up at the bar told me that he looks like a cop he used to know.”

“Go back to him,” Mel said, “and say that he should mind his own business.”

Mel and Ork peered at each other maybe a quarter of a minute. The latter’s nostrils flared, then he walked away.

“Friendly place,” I commented.

“Crooks are a skittish lot,” Mel countered.

“I thought you gave all that up.”

“I just like the atmosphere. Sometimes you get the need to talk to people who have the right language behind their eyes.”

I nodded.

“What can I do for you, King?”

“Tell me why you came to my office that day,” I said simply.

“I told you already.”

“Maybe pad it with some details.”

“Why?”

“Because I might want to ask you for something and you’re named after Satan.”

Melquarth Frost grinned.

“I saw a red bird in Prospect Park two days before you busted me,” he said.

“A red bird.”

“Pure scarlet,” he assented with a vigorous nod. “At first it was just a flash up in the trees, in between the leaves. But then it landed on a branch maybe forty feet away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I found myself hoping that it would get closer so I could get a better look. I was sitting on a park bench getting my head together for the job. The thing took wing and landed on the lawn in front’a me. It was big, almost the size of a crow, and there was a single black feather on the crown of its head.”

There was what I can only call a beatific look on the ex — heist man’s face.

“And?” I said.

“He looked at me and I knew that that meant something. Here some completely wild animal comes right up to you and looks you in the eye. That means something.”

He had me.

“What?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure about the exact message, but a bird means freedom and the color red means pay attention. And I thought that a bird like that, a bird that stood out like a flare in the night, was something like me.

“And then, when the prosecutor asked you to say something about me that would throw me under the bus, you refused. You were the better man when I was running and again when I was helpless.

“Don’t get me wrong. I could have done my time. I wasn’t afraid, but you weren’t either. You were like that red bird in the tree and then you came down. That was the sign — as clear as the nose on Ork’s ugly face.

“I was committed to one more job and, like I told you, my partner shot me in the back. That right there was the final straw — the business was finished with me.”

I was convinced that Mel was crazy. But his psychopath’s vision of the world seemed cohesive and certain; something I could trust to be what it was.

“I’m involved in a couple of cases,” I said after an appreciative pause. “I’m gonna need some help and I thought maybe I could hire you. I got a small budget and could hire a man. It’s not heist money, but you’re not a heist man anymore.”

“You got it.”

“Don’t you wanna hear what it is?”

“Sure. You got to tell me, but, Mr. Oliver, if that red bird asked me to follow him I would have said yes too.”

“How much will you charge?”

“A dollar now and a dollar when it’s through.”

I took a dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to him.

“You want to take a walk with me?” I asked Melquarth Frost.

He put the dollar in his breast pocket and stood.

I followed him up the stairs and out into a fate filled with madmen and red birds, nameless cops and women who fooled you again and again.