The Havana Room

Seven

I hurried out of Allison's apartment a few minutes later, wondering which was more disturbing, Allison's calculated seduction, or the fact that Sally Cowles lived directly across the street from her. Allison had seen me stare at the girl, seen it all too well, and after her initial banter about Jay doing the same thing- a naked attempt to reassure herself- I'd said nothing, had only glanced stupidly at her, then stared again across the street. At this, Allison took two shocked steps backward, arms suddenly crossed in front of her, eyes jittery and defensive, as if she'd been struck in the face. Why had the two men who'd recently come to her apartment both been fixated on a teenage girl living across the street? For a moment I thought Allison was going to run to the phone and call the police. But she was frozen where she stood. We were both stunned, in factrevealed as strangers to each other, silhouettes caught in Jay's strange psychic machinery. I almost blurted out that the girl was the daughter of one of his tenants, and that he appeared to be obsessed with her, but I stopped myself.

Allison, however, had seen me nearly tell her. "You know who that girl is!" she said. "I can see it in your face!"

I picked up my coat, feeling the Derek Jeter ball in the pocket. "I better go."

Allison didn't like my overly calm tone. "What's going on?"

I didn't tell her, because I couldn't. What was going on? On my subway ride home, pressed between commuters headed downtown, I didn't know what to worry about more, H.J., or Marceno, or Sally Cowles. It made for a jangled journey, and only a block away from my apartment, hunched against the morning's cold, did I remember my lunch with Dan Tuthill that day. He was a connection to my old life, one I wanted to keep. I'd take a long shower, pull myself together, and at lunch subtly pump Tuthill for possible job leads. I quickened my pace, and as I did I saw an old man pass by on the sidewalk wearing a spectacular red silk tie that looked a great deal like the one Judith had given to me many Christmases past, back when I didn't move dead men in the night or sleep with women addicted to psychedelic fish flesh. The man lurched along in an army jacket and a wool cap, a certain triumphant energy in his eyes, as if he had stuffed his pockets with contraband, and the incongruity of the red silk tie should have warned me that, indeed, this was what had happened.

When I turned the corner I saw a swarm of homeless people, office boys, and garment workers in front of my building, several fighting over a pile of junk in the street. Someone had pulled a car up and was shoveling clothes and other household items into the trunk. I got closer. The stuff looked like- like my stuff. I glanced up at my apartment window. It was shattered, frame and all.

I broke into a run and flew into my building and up the stairs. On the third floor, I found my apartment door ajar, ripped off one hinge, the lock splintered. The sight was so improbable that I thought I'd entered the wrong apartment. They- whoever they were- had emptied the place, literally thrown everything I owned out of the two windows: the bed, the tables, the chairs, the clothes, the pots and pans, my old tennis racquet, long unused, the bank account records, the checkbook, the divorce papers, the food in the refrigerator, just all of it, the bath towels, the books, pillows, the rug, the CDs, the cleanser under the sink, the stereo, the clean socks, all the cheap junk of an ever cheaper life. I checked the closets. Empty, not a coat hanger. I checked under the sink. Nothing. In the corner the radiator whistled as the steam rose in the building's pipes. Newly naked, the apartment was reduced to its essence: pathetic, dirty, small. A hole.

But wait- they'd left one thing in the living room, with a certain sadistic flourish: a broom, propped casually against the wall. I edged to the window and looked out. My old belongings were strewn twenty yards down the sidewalk, into the gutter. Whatever had carried or bounced into the street proper had been run over many times by the belching delivery trucks that serviced the block.

In the bedroom, on the wall where my bed used to be, red-spray-paint letters looped two feet high: GIVE ME WHAT I WANT. I collapsed to one knee, staggered by my predicament.

"Nobody saw them," came a voice behind me. It was the kindly and ineffectual super. He was holding a handful of envelopes. "Well, they saw it was a couple of guys, that's all."

"White guys? Black guys?"

"Like I said, nobody saw them." He swung his eyes around the bare walls. "I called the police, though who knows when they show up."

He held up the envelopes. "They broke into your mailbox, too. You expecting something?"

I shook my head, dazed by the whole event.

"You, uh-" He studied me with the intent to get to the bottom of the problem. "So you know why they come do this to you? You know who these guys are? The police are going to have a lot of questions." He stared at me meaningfully, in the manner of a man who has already seen far too many things in his time- bodies drained of blood in bathtubs, widows curled stiffly in their beds, kitchens set afire, drunks insensate on the stairs. "I don't know who is in the wrong, don't know if it's them or if it's you. I don't know if you did something to make some peoples mad at you, if they're going to come back, okay?"

"I see what you mean," I said.

"So I brought you your mail, just in case, you know-"

"In case I felt like not being here for a while."

"You got it, yes."

"I'll pay for the door, the window, all that."

He nodded, unmollified, and his voice found his genuine mood: "Why don't you get out, Mr. Wyeth? I mean now. We don't need problems here. This building is full of peaceful people."

"I didn't-"

"The police are coming, Mr. Wyeth. They will have some questions for you."

I took the mail from him, jammed it in my coat pocket, and hit the stairs. Outside, I saw a man holding a picture frame- Timothy in his baseball uniform, bat cocked on his shoulder, a happy grin on his face.

"Give me that," I said. "That's my son."

"Fuck you, Slim."

"This is all my stuff!" I hollered.

"Not no more."

"Give me the picture."

He started to rip apart the frame and I picked up what used to be the leg of my kitchen table. "You can have all this stuff," I announced, sweeping my hands at the clothes and shoes and kitchen chairs, all of it. "Just let me have the picture of my son!"

"Put down the stick."

"No," I said.

"I'm not giving you the fucking-"

Dead Herschel on a tractor, the mysterious Jay Rainey, the disturbing nocturnal activities of Allison- I swung the table leg in frustration at all of them, catching the man in the shoulder. He howled in fury.

"I'm kill you, you fuck!"

"No you're not!" I snarled, foolish beyond any past history of myself. "I'm going to hit you until you give me that picture, okay? Ready?" I swung the table leg like a bat. "Right in the head, ready?"

He flung the photo to the ground, cracking the glass. I snatched it up. I wanted to poke through the trash for my checkbook or more photos of Timothy, but a police car turned the corner of the block. I slipped down the street, not much more than a vagrant now, hunted and alone.

I was a block from the Harvard Club, on my way to lunch in a new shirt, when I figured out who to call. Martha Hallock.

"Not you again?" she said. "The Grand Inquisitor?"

"Jay's in real trouble, Martha. I'm trying to help him."

"This I doubt."

"He's got people breathing down his neck, Martha, and I can't reach him." I tried to drain the fury and fear out of my voice. "You had something to do with the deal, didn't you? These people are putting a lot of pressure on him now. And me. We need to-"

"I'm afraid you're on your own."

"Thank you," I said, adding, "you fucking old witch."

There was no response, just a series of wheezy, shallow breaths. Finally Martha's voice returned, no longer defiant, but rather somehow burdened. "How much trouble is he in?"

"A lot," I said. "And I don't even know where he is."

"Well, neither do I."

"But you could tell me what I'm dealing with here."

"I could-"

"But?"

"— but I don't have my broomstick."

"Broomstick?"

"Yes, the fucking old witch wants to come talk to the rude Manhattan lawyer but doesn't have a broomstick. However, the fucking old witch could take the 10 a.m. bus into the city tomorrow, I guess."

"The rude Manhattan lawyer would be honored."

"The old witch is fat and unstable on her feet," Martha continued, "and will need assistance."

"Not to worry. Would she like a nice meal as well?"

"Oh, yes."

"How about lunch in a great old steakhouse?"

"Swell beans, as we used to say when I was young, back in the seventeenth century."

"I guess witches live a long time."

"Too long, Mr. Wyeth, that's the problem." She hung up.

Now I stood outside the Harvard Club, not quite able to step inside. A cold Manhattan rain, the kind that promises you nothing but misery, blew in sheets across the avenue, smattering the building. I saw Dan Tuthill waiting for me in the anteroom near the coat check, rocking on his heels, inspecting the cuffs of his shirt, and impossibly, looking a little fatter than two days before. I stepped inside and he shook my hand. We headed straight to the dining room, where we were shown to a table. After we ordered, I asked, "How's Mindy?"

"She's fine. I mean, you know how it was with me…" Dan sighed. "Things are, well, we've got the kids, I always say."

"How's the lawyerly life then?"

"The usual. Pimps and maggots."

"Which are you?"

"I go back and forth- as necessary."

"What about Kirmer, my old pal?"

His smile dropped. "Kirmer? He's running the place, Bill."

"What about-?"

"All those guys? Nah, gone. He mowed down every one of them. Tied them up with phone wire and threw them in the river." He smiled. "Everything's different, Bill, the secretaries, the ways things are organized. I feel like a dinosaur and I'm forty-four!" He smiled up at the waiter. "Scotch on the rocks, double." He looked back at me. "And I don't like the way the wind is blowing. You have to have a thousand attorneys on staff these days to compete! The business is so global, so complex. All these Indian kids who passed the bar in New York and Bombay and have a master's degree in computer systems or bioengineering. They're actually smarter than you or me, Bill, that's the honest fucking truth. So the firm is going to go in directions that a lot of the old guys can't go."

"But you're set, right?"

"They have to buy me out if I leave, everything, even buy my shoes." We sat there, Dan paddling his soup with his spoon to make the steam rise. "Heard you weren't doing much," he said softly.

"Me?" I said. "No."

"Not even a little work?"

"A little. But very little."

"You into something else?"

I shook my head.

"What they did to you was fucking criminal, Bill."

I shrugged. "They had good lawyers."

"Yeah." Dan leaned closer. "So, listen," he said, "I'm going to tell Kirmer to take his hand out of my ass."

"Leave?"

"Leave? Eject, pal. Let those fuckers rot in their own gravy. I got some bucks set aside, I got my partnership share coming to me, and I've got Mindy's father."

"I don't get it."

Dan sat back and rubbed his chest, which meant, I remembered, that he had a story to tell. "Well, you know I'm a bad guy, I slink around."

"I always figured," I said.

"You, however, always kept your whistle clean."

"I'm a conformist," I said. "Dull as dishwater."

He grunted.

"Anyway, Mindy's dad."

He was eager to talk about it, I could see. "It's a crazy thing, Bill. Something you'd never expect. Mindy's dad calls me up three weeks ago, says he wants to play golf. I say okay, and so we go out to the National in East Hampton. Beautiful. He's a pretty distinguished guy, made a mint in the seventies with the airlines. He's got to be worth like two hundred million bucks. Can live off the interest of the interest."

"Does some of it go to Mindy?"

"Yeah, someday, but this guy's going to live till he's ninety, minimum. His resting pulse is fifty-four, blood pressure ninety-four over seventy."

"Nice guy?"

"No. Not at all. A bastard. A manipulator. Doesn't have enough to do with himself. Wife died ten years ago, and now he has this beautiful Japanese lady who lives with him. There's Japanese stuff all over the house. Bamboo rugs, jade things. Plus fish and rice every night. He looks great, looks relaxed. She takes care of everything, is my bet. That whole thing about the compliant Asian woman is a bunch of shit. She's the one in control. He's given up control."

"Well, he still controls two hundred million bucks."

"So we play a couple of holes. I keep waiting. Nothing. He's playing well, me, nothing. I'm all over the place."

"Nervous."

"Totally. So there's a bench near the sixth tee. He says let's have a seat."

"This was it."

"Yep." Dan nodded as the entree arrived. "We sit down. He takes off his golf glove and puts it on my knee. Says, Listen, I know you're fucking another woman besides my daughter, maybe even more than one."

"He use that word?"

"Yes, fucking, which is a bad sign, of course. Because it's angry."

I agreed. "Visceral."

"I'm thinking, Oh no, he's angry, he's going to hit me with his seven iron. He says, Don't ask how I know, but I do. The world's a small place."

"So were you?" I asked.

Dan raised his palm. "I'm going to plead the Fifth Amendment, senator."

"Fine."

"So then he says, I know Mindy is a pain. I raised her. I know what she's like. But you can't leave her. I'm just about crapping in my pants at this point. I say, Okay. He says, No, I really mean it. I know she's gotten overweight. Actually he said fat. He used that word, about his daughter! I sort of waved my hands, you know, it's no big deal. I'm fat, too, of course. But she has gotten fat. Really fat. Purposefully fat, even. I mean, Bill, it creates a copulatory impediment. A sexual handicap. The only thing that works, frankly, is from behind."

I put my hands up in front of me. "Hey, I'm not asking you to tell me this- not that it's not incredibly fascinating."

"Don't worry, this goes somewhere. It connects to your future, in fact."

"The sexual position you use with your obese wife impinges on my future?"

"Well, in a manner of speaking. Just listen. So, Mindy's father looks at me and says-"

At that moment my phone rang.

"Quick, get it." Dan was irritated. "They don't like that here."

"Martha?" I answered, taking a guess. "You change your mind?"

"Yo, fuckwango!" came a male voice. "You got the wrong number!"

"Excuse me?"

"Hey, I'm looking for this guy, he gave me this number. In Brooklyn."

Dan was watching me.

"Is this Helmo?" I asked.

"Yeah. I got that address for you, the one we was talking about? Rainey shows up again this morning, swung the bat for a hour. I followed him home. I want my three hundred bucks."

"What's the address?"

"Who you think I am?" he hollered in my ear. "Give me the three hundred first!"

"Let's meet," I suggested.

"Half hour in front of the batting cages."

"I can't do that."

"What the fuck?"

I worried Dan could hear the voice in my ear. "How about three this afternoon?"

"Be there. Or I'm telling Rainey about you."

I put the phone away.

"Who was it?" asked Dan.

"Some guy who'll probably double-cross me."

He nodded flatly. "Okay, so where was I? So Mindy's father, right. We're on the bench near the sixth tee. And he says, I know everything that you are or will be thinking right now. I know it. So I'm sitting there, I'm shish kabob. I'm cooked son-in-law. Then he says, I understand who you are."

"What?"

Dan nodded vigorously, mouth full of food. "He says I understand who you are. Then he says, But you can't leave her. I say, I have no plans to leave her, it would hurt the kids too much. He's not fooled. He says he's heard twenty or thirty of his friends say the same thing over the years. They always leave their wives anyway, soon as the kids are out of the house. Mindy will never leave you, he says. She doesn't have it in her, even if she wanted to. She's weak. That's true. Plus, he says, plus she loves you too much, not to mention the kids. I feel like a pig when he says this. He's right, of course, Mindy with her moon eyes, mooning after me, seeing if I'm happy, seeing if I have a drink. She'll do anything for me, Bill, suck my freaking toes, anything… which I hate, Of course! She's lost all her self-respect, she just wants to be loved, filled up, like the new four-hundred-and-fifty-gallon oil tank I got in the basement in case of shortages. Huge, extra capacity! Mindy's like that, she lies there in bed with her fat legs out and calls to me, like, Oh just please come love me, please, please, waving her arms and moaning, Oh come tell me everything is okay. And it sort of breaks my heart but also sort of makes me hate her." Here Dan paused, eyes narrowing, mouth an evil little smile. "I like those thin girls who are tough cases, manthe sly, mean ones who you got to crack open."

He breathed out heavily, gulped his drink.

"Hey Dan," I said. "We're barely done with the soup."

"Yeah, then he says, I want to make you an offer. I say okay, what? And he says if you don't make the deal now, you will never get this offer again. Ever."

"And?"

"He says, two million dollars and you promise you will never leave my daughter."

"Two million?"

"I can't even open my mouth. It's not a lot of money to him, remember. He says, I know you want to know what the catch is, what the conditions are. I say well, sure. I try to be relaxed saying it but it sort of squeaks out. He says, I'd never tell another man he couldn't sleep around. That's unrealistic. You have to let the big dog hunt, and all that. So here're my conditions, he says. Number one, you never leave Mindy. Never. Like that. A little scary. Number two, you get a vasectomy. So even though you do fuck around, you don't get anyone pregnant, and number three, you use the money in the exact way I tell you, don't just eat it up."

"Don't buy a vineyard."

"A vineyard, a castle in Scotland, whatever."

"So?"

"So he says, Think about it while I tee off. After I hit my ball, he says, I'm going to come back to the bench and get your answer. If you have no answer, he says, I'll assume no deal. If you say no, I'll never offer it to you again. Ever. "

"And you believe that."

"Totally."

"Is he going to tell you how you have to use the money before you agree to take it?"

"I asked that. The answer was no."

"Tough game."

Dan nodded, though not without some appreciation for the old man. "Then he goes, If you say yes, I'll write you a check and assume that you'll be good to your word. Plus, you'll send me a copy of the vasectomy bill." Dan shot his hands in the air, fork above his head. "Bill! He wants documentation that they chopped up my nuts! Then he goes over and puts down his golf ball, takes out his driver."

"He's forcing an answer."

"Yeah, and I'm a little pissed off, plus a little shocked."

"It's total guts-ball poker," I agreed.

"Total."

"Pretty emasculating to have the father-in-law insisting on the snip job."

"You're telling me." Dan pushed his empty plate away. "So he lines up the ball and gets his grip right, then whacks the hell out of it. The ball disappears. Then he picks up his tee and comes back to me. I'm still sitting on the bench. I haven't moved."

"You've decided to say yes."

"I've decided to say no."

"Really?" This didn't seem like the Dan Tuthill I remembered, always looking for the next cash-pipe to suck on.

"Yeah. I mean, I can't be bought like that! Fuck him! Mindy's got an ass like a wrinkled beach ball! She tries to hide it but I see it anyway. Fucking lowers my testosterone, too! So I'm thinking, a few more years, let the kids get out of school, I can split up and go hunting for these cha-chas I see in the bars all the time." He leaned close again, his eyes sleepy-looking. "You have any idea of the fucking action that's out there, Bill? Even for a fat old shit like me? Their ovaries are calling to them, like trumpets from the mountains! Make us pregnant, make us pregnant, do something about all this es-tro-gen! They can't help themselves, Bill! It's wired in, it's biological. These apartment houses filled with unmarried women? Palaces of estrogen!" He pointed to his chest. "I'm perfect, see. I'm well off, physically unattractive, and in no way marriageable. It's totally counterintuitive, and most women would never admit it. I'm perfect for the woman who needs sex, some kind of sex, but doesn't want to get involved with somebody she might actually get involved with! Do you see that? It's a niche specialty. They all say they are looking for the good guys or the husband types, but those are the guys that freak them out! Guys like me, they know what to do with. See? A few laughs, a few drinks, fuckle you, fuckle me, see you later, I lost your business card, so what, no harm, no foul. Right?"

"Wow." Somehow this sounded harsh, despite my disastrous exit from Allison's apartment that morning.

"The girls are desperate, man! They hate to admit it, and they won't admit it, but it's a fact! So I'm figuring, I get to fifty, I'm single again, I drop eighty pounds, I got ten years of cha-cha to look forward to."

"But your kids," I said, thinking of my son. "It'd kill them."

He waved this away. "I'd let them grow up a bit. They know things aren't so great, anyway."

I didn't want to hear any of this.

He smiled. "So now Mindy's father comes over and says, Well? Like that- Well? I'm going to have some guy, some asshole who left his wife, chop up my testicles? I'm going to live with this woman who drives me nuts, the whole thing? Forget it! What am I, a monkey on a string? Forget the money! I make plenty of money! Fuck him, I can't be bought, right?"

"Right," I said in solidarity.

Dan settled back, rested his hands on his stomach, the matter seemingly as settled as his soup. "So I look up at him, and I say, 'You said two million?' "

"And he says, 'Yes.' "

"And I say, 'Make it three.' "

"What?"

"And he says yes! It's a deal!"

"Wait- what?"

"It's a deal! Three mil! We shook hands! I looked him in the eye! Fact, we both got a little moist about it. He hugged me, even. And it is a deal. I'm good for it. Felt good, in fact, it felt very good, Bill! I know I'm safe now. I'm sort of dead, in fact. The gate closed, the train left the station, whatever. It feels good, too. I can't fuck things up now, because I took the money! I know this, I accept this, okay? And now I feel really, really good."

"So you had the vasectomy?"

"Piece of cake. Sore for a few days, nothing more."

"What about the cha-chas?"

He shrugged. "Whatever. I don't seem as interested."

"Psychological?"

"Probably. Whatever."

I stared at him. Dan's mood was bouncing around so much that I dared not push the conversation much further. "So you asked me to lunch so that you could tell me someone handed you three million dollars on the golf course to get your balls disconnected?"

"No, Bill," he said. "I asked you to lunch because I want to offer you a job, you jerk-weed."

I didn't understand.

"Remember, I had to use the money exactly as he specified. And he specified I take it and open my own firm, a boutique firm. He gave me a whole speech, how I was talented and had great energy and the reason I was fucking around was I'd lost my way, I was swallowed up in a large firm and my talents couldn't shine. I was wasting my time with the cha-chas when I could be building something, something big. He said I would use the three million for seed money, that he knew plenty of bankers who would help me out. It was beautiful. He's a beautiful man, I'm telling you. Wise. Deeply wise. So I'm taking my snip-job money, the partnership buyout, and some other stuff. I've got space on Fifty-third Street, bought out what was left of a dot-com lease. Company crashed and burned, place was empty for a year. The agent practically gave it away, said the original leaseholder was panicked, living off leaves and twigs. So, basically, I stole it. Eight of my long-term clients are coming with me, plus some smaller new ones. I've got some young guys from the firm who want to come with me. All of them can make rain. Plus me." He paused, watching me absorb this scenario. "What I need is a guy who'll look at everything coming in and going out. The young guys don't have the overall background. They can't sit tight, they need action. Which is fine. I'm going to run them like dogs. But I need a guy in the center."

"Someone cheap, too."

"Okay, I admit that. I can't pay big-league money. But it'll be decent. We'll be making the big gravy in a couple of years. I mean, how much are you making now?"

I almost smiled. The salesman in Brooks Brothers that morning had frowned when I discarded my dirty shirt in a trash can on the way out. "Not enough," I said.

Dan knocked his tongue around his mouth. "So, listen, this is a step up, a step back. You can help me, I can help you."

"You have staff, secretaries, fax machines, stuff like that?"

"We're good to go."

"When're you starting up?"

"Tuesday. I should have contacted you earlier, I admit."

A few years back I'd have received this information as an insult. But no longer. He knew I was unemployed. "First choice fell through?" I said.

Dan looked into my eyes.

"Just tell me," I said. "I can take it."

"I had a guy, a great guy, and he said yes, but he got another offer last week. I'd sent him the contract but he hadn't signed it. He totally screwed me. Then I saw you at the game."

"Right."

"You're not offended?"

"Nah."

"Good."

"What are you going to pay me, Dan?"

He told me. Considering my experience, it was nickels and dimes. Considering I was a homeless, unemployed drifter trying not to get arrested for moving a dead body, or worse, it was pretty good.

"You've got to do better than that," I said.

"I'll knock it up twenty-five percent in nine months once we get some cash flow."

"Knock it up twenty now, twenty in nine months, or take your chances with the next guy you meet at a basketball game."

He looked at me. "That's a little rich."

"You're the guy getting three million clams on the sixth tee."

"Fifteen percent now, twenty more in nine."

"Twenty now, fifteen in nine," I said.

"Deal."

"Deal."

We shook hands. He went into the further particulars of the job, the setup, the address, everything, but I only half listened, so happy was I to be back in the world. "This'll get you started," he said, reaching into his briefcase.

"You brought paperwork? You knew I'd say yes?"

He only smiled. I glanced at the materials, eager to familiarize myself with the cases and clients he was bringing with him. I remembered several- in the torpor of litigation they hadn't progressed far in the intervening years- but most were new and reminded me again of the basic conflict built into all human activity; in front of me were torts for nonpayment, breach of contract, nonperformance, illegal competition, copyright infringement, patent infringement, and product failure. The legal language did not really disguise the bile and greed and hatred accumulating in each case, but at least the entities and individuals were fighting through civilized means, not kidnapping and intimidation.

"Wait, I got something else," Dan said, reaching into his briefcase again.

"What?"

"This. I had the guy do it in one day." He handed me a box of business cards. They had my name and new number on them, the address of the firm, everything.

I fanned the cards. Their stiff newness was satisfying. "You know I love this."

"Figured," said Dan. "Makes it feel official." He watched a boat of ice cream float down in front of his place. "Bill, one more thing."

"Sure."

"Just reassure me that- that you're coming to me with no problems."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean with no situations, no bad clients. No problems."

"Everybody has problems."

"Sure, sure," he said. "I mean real problems. Like funny clients you might be working with, whatever…"

"Not to worry," I said, starting to worry.

Sixty minutes later I stood in the doorway of the batting cages building in Brooklyn and spotted Helmo. He saw me right away and gave me that chin-up recognition guys use when they don't want to call out. I followed him across the street under the shadows of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He smelled like Chinese food, but I didn't bring it up.

"So I was thinking," he said.

"About what?"

"I was thinking about your teeth."

"My teeth?"

"Yeah. They're good."

"So?"

"So I think three hundred is too low."

"Why?"

"Your teeth're too good. So're your clothes. Guy that's got good teeth, he can pay more."

I shook my head. Everyone was a chiseler, working the extra percentage, biting off the last dime. Including me.

"You want it or not?"

"How much?" I grumbled.

"Five hundred."

I dug it out of my wallet. Helmo handed me a slip of paper with Jay's address written in block letters. "You gotta go in the back. It's over the garage, up the side. I watched him go in there myself."

"How do you know it's not a friend's house or something?" I thought of Allison's anxiety about another woman. "Maybe a girlfriend?"

Helmo nodded slyly. "You check that place out, you'll see nobody else lives there."

"Which means-?"

"Just check it out. Trust in your common man, dude."

I stared at the address in my hand, it was near Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. "It's only about ten blocks away."

"Deal's a deal, bro."

I was eager to get going.

"What you looking for him for, anyway?" Helmo asked. "He do something bad?"

If Jay came back to the cages, Helmo could tell him of my inquiry, maybe get a round-trip payday.

"No, no, it's not like that," I said. "I'm trying to help the guy."

"Trying-a save his ass, like?"

"Something like that."

I set off then, on foot. Along Third Avenue under the BQE, then up the hill on Seventeenth Street. Once an Italian, maybe Irish neighborhood, now drifting Latino and urban mix. That's what everything is now, urban mix. If you're a white guy wearing a great suit in these places, you might as well have a blue-and-white NYPD chopper hovering over your head, announcing your appearance. I bought a Giants cap and a quart of milk at the corner deli, and yanked up my coat collar, hiding my jacket and tie. Cap low, carrying the plastic bag, shuffling along, trying to blend into the neighborhood. You could be somebody else. You aren't necessarily this thing or that. Just some guy. You don't look at people, because you're not interested, and if you're not interested, then it's no problem, we got no problem here.

I reached Seventeenth Street and found the address. Behind the house stood a garage with what looked like an illegal, owner-built addition on top, its shingles crooked, windows off-plumb, the roofing job patched and repatched. Here was the home of a man buying a three-million-dollar commercial building in downtown Manhattan? The idea was absurd. Behind the garage rose a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence grown over with ivy and ribboned with trash. A burglar could climb over it, but it wouldn't be much fun, and if you fell down on the garage side, you landed on a disassembled powerboat and a pile of cement blocks. Thus the apartment over the garage was well protected; the only way in was the exterior wooden staircase up the side. I looked behind me- no one watched. I pushed through the gate. Someone had abandoned a repainting job on the side of the house: Ladder, bucket, and brushes all fallen to the ground. In the weeds lay a rotting pile of freebie newspapers, phone books, shopping fliers, a leaking car battery, and whatever else someone didn't have the time for. I climbed the stairs and peered inside the one small window. The shade was down, nothing. I tried the door- locked. I knocked softly. Nothing. Maybe it was the wrong place; maybe Helmo had ripped me off. Nothing I'd seen proved Jay lived here. Going down the stairs I noticed that the treads were battered and worn. Even the risers were scraped, vertically. And there was a streaked pattern to the wear, suggesting repetition, something heavy going up or down on a regular basis.

Next I tried the garage door; it went up. I ducked beneath and closed it behind me. In the dusty half-light I recognized Jay's truck, a little slush stain on the sidewalls from the trip three nights prior. The truck's doors were locked. I peered into the windows; nothing. But the walls of the garage, I saw, were lined with large tanks, perhaps two dozen. I turned my attention to some boxes set in the back of the garage. They held car stuff, mostly, plus knitting materials and books on collecting dollhouses. Probably not Jay's. What else?

I slipped back under the garage door, picked up one of the paint cans in the weeds, and climbed the stairs. The apartment door was old, with nine panels of glass. I looked around, checked the street. This isn't much of a crime, I told myself, considering what he's already put me through. I swung the paint can against one of the bottom panels, and it cracked the glass enough for me to break out a few pieces. I checked the street again; nobody saw me drop the paint can into the weeds. I reached inside and flipped the dead-bolt lock. The door didn't open. I felt around and found a slide bolt below the doorknob.

Three minutes, I told myself- in and then get the hell out. Here I was breaking into someone's apartment hours after someone had broken into mine. Nice. I turned the knob and shut the door behind me. Jay would discover that someone had broken in, but he wouldn't know who.

The room was a monk's cell ten feet by twelve. You entered directly into the bedroom. A simple camp bed, neatly made. Next to it, an answering machine, red message-light blinking. To one side sat an enormous stainless steel box with a small window in its top, not unlike a space-age sarcophagus. It was the biggest thing in the room and a quick inspection of its dials and switches revealed it to be a hyperbolic oxygen chamber.

Oxygen. The man needed oxygen?

Three oxygen tanks identical to the ones in the garage stood next to the chamber. Bottled oxygen is a controlled substance, I remembered, considered a medicine. You need a doctor's prescription to get it. The tanks are heavy when full. They had to be delivered, and were probably carried with some kind of dolly up and down the outside stairs, hence the wear on the treads.

At the foot of the bed stood an oxygen compressor that huffed rhythmically, its sound not unlike that of waves breaking on a beach.

I saw two trunks under the bed and slid them out. Look inside? I'd come this far, so yes. The first trunk contained work tools: hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches. The second had socks, jeans, underwear, T-shirts, all neatly folded. Such neatness is depressing, as if one is preparing for death. I closed the trunks and slid them back. In Jay's closet hung ten suits arranged by color, each with matching shirt and tie, including the one he'd worn the night I'd met him in the Havana Room. These were expensive, good-looking clothes, but in the context of the tiny room, they seemed costumes for a theatrical production. Here was a man who lived militarily, who could move out in the amount of time it took to carry his belongings down the stairs. Perhaps four trips, not including the hyperbolic chamber. In the back of the closet, under a raincoat, sat the seltzer-water box Allison had given him the night of the deal. I tipped it toward myself to look inside: the cash was gone, all of it. Two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. Where had he stashed it?

Seconds, burning away. I checked my watch. I'd been inside the apartment one minute. The answering machine beckoned. What else? The kitchenette off to one side looked unused. The refrigerator had no food in it, only a carton of orange juice, several bottles of vitamins, and a dozen odd unmarked cardboard boxes. I pulled one out and opened it. Inside clattered bottles labeled UNIVERSITY OF IOWA HOSPITALS PHARMACY, and by hand: Adrenaline, 500 mg. Another marked Dexi-amphetamine. Prednisone in 10 mg pills. Another marked "Andro." Below this were dozens of small inhalers marked Beclomethasone, Ventolin, Serevent, Albuterol. All stuff to open up the airway, get more oxygen in. In a second box was a bottle of white pills marked Singulair. None of the containers carried the name of a prescribing physician.

In the freezer: hot dogs, bread, TV dinners, ice.

The bathroom was spotless. One towel. Shaving kit. I looked inside. Nothing unusual. No pills in the cabinet. No condoms, no electric nose-hair buzzers. Next to the toilet was a stack of reading material, and it was not your usual hodgepodge of glossy magazines and New Yorker cartoon collections: here, with some articles dog-eared for reference, lay copies of the Journal of American Pulmonary Specialists, The Report of the Oxygen Therapists Association, a printout of "Asthma and the Pulsed Administration of Synthetic Adrenaline," Clinical Tests of Respiratory Function, the Research Journal of the New York Hospitals' Endocrinology Association, and so on. Clearly Jay suffered from some debilitating respiratory problem and was more or less managing his own treatment, depressingly so. I heard myself exhale, out of dread, and put the materials back the way I'd found them. I checked my watch. Six minutes, for God's sake.

I returned to the bedroom and froze there- fascinated, saddened, perplexed. Inasmuch as Jay's life had a physical center, this was it, and what a lonely center it was, too. I saw no television, no personal mail, no sign of indulgent activity or relaxation. No wonder he hadn't told Allison where he lived.

Next to the bed stood a wooden desk and a chair. On top was a giveaway calendar from a heating oil company, and this- a full-height photo of Sally Cowles, taken at great distance. She was in her school uniform, walking on a sidewalk with two friends on a sunny afternoon. From the trees, I could see that the photo had been shot in the late fall or early winter. The girls wore coats but not gloves or hats, and the surfaces of the buildings around them suggested a well-to-do neighborhood in the city. Upper East Side, perhaps, behind them a flower shop. Was there a flower shop near Allison's apartment? Around the corner on the avenue? The girls were walking with unconscious happiness, knapsacks jingling, their school uniforms rippling, hair caught by the breeze, matching socks different lengths. I tried to picture Jay studying this photo. It was in no way overtly sexual, at least not to me. But certain men, I knew, were driven into a frenzy by the sight of a girl in a school uniform. The implied innocence sent them into spasms of lust, and despite myself, then and there I remembered a business trip to Tokyo almost ten years earlier when I was dragged by three drunken Japanese businessmen into a strip joint in the famed Shinjuku district, where along with two hundred more Japanese businessmen I watched one near-pubescent girl after another shed her plaid school uniform and bobby socks. The sight had left me cold- I prefer older women with the mark of gravity upon them, with eyes that smoke with the absolute lack of innocence- but the Japanese men were transfixed by the sight, a few even producing expensive cameras and unapologetically recording the open-thighed displays for later review. Was Jay such a man? I couldn't believe it, I didn't want to believe it.

What I wanted to do was listen to the answering machine message. Maybe Allison really did have his number. Instead I slid open the desk drawer, wondering if Jay perhaps kept his legal papers in there, such as copies of the contract for the building on Reade Street. But the drawer was empty, save for a few pens and rubber bands and a paper pad of order slips for Brooklyn Oxygen and Hospital Supplies, adorned with their motto, SAFETY, RELIABILITY, AND PROMPT DELIVERY. This, I remembered, matched the slip of paper Jay had given me two days earlier with the restaurant address where I'd met Marceno.

What else? Hurry, I told myself, find the important stuff. I spied a list tacked to the wall:

Every day:

300 push-ups, no O

500 sit-ups, O afterward okay

Read newspapers (for conversation)

Read one page of the dictionary

Maintain foot hygiene, inspect for infection

Don't obsess about FEV

So here was the O that had upset Allison. O for oxygen, oxygen clearly being delivered to the garage downstairs. This was why the garage door had been left open, so that the empty tanks could be picked up; in all likelihood, I realized, their delivery schedule corresponded to the regularly appearing O's that Allison had seen in Jay's date book. A man who needs oxygen delivered will know when it is coming.

There, a secret revealed, worth a lot more than my investment of five hundred dollars and a couple of subway rides. But what was FEV? And why might Jay obsess about it? Did the letters stand for someone, another young woman he was stalking? Next to the list hung a small framed newspaper clipping with a photograph. It showed a young man in a bulky baseball uniform and batting helmet swinging a bat. The swing is nearly over and he is off balance from the effort. The headline read CLANKS HOMER IN INTERCOUNTY CHAMP DUEL. I checked the date; the clip was fifteen years old.

John "Jay" Rainey, of Jamesport, hit a towering three-run homer yesterday in the intercounty summer-league play at Bethpage High School, clinching their victory 3–1.

Rainey, who is leading the Bulldogs in slugging this season with sixteen round-trippers in twenty-three games, had every ballplayer's dream come true when he was recently signed to a minor league contract by the New York Yankees, following his second college season. Rainey will report to their double A farm team in three weeks.

His homer came off of Tino Salgado, Bethpage's ace pitcher who went 6–1 during the regular season. Salgado had been throwing a shutout until the Bulldog's homer.

"I got a good look at it," Rainey said after the game. "I'm just glad we won."

To be signed to a minor league baseball contract is quite an honor, of course, but this is not what caught my attention. The article suggested that Rainey's condition worsened after the date of the article, for no major league team signs up a prospect without giving him a thorough physical first. Martha Hallock had mentioned an accident. Was this the cause of Rainey's trouble?

Time to leave, no matter how much I wanted to stay. But at the door I was drawn back to the oxygen chamber, so sleek and streamlined, a bullet-shaped casket. I touched the spring-loaded door and it rose slowly, revealing a white, body-length cushion. Its spotlessness was depressing. Just about the loneliest place imaginable. Inside was a reading light and a pad of paper and pen. I flipped open the pad: Dear Mr. David Cowles, said the first sheet. This is an extremely difficult letter to write. For many years now — The letter ended. The next sheet said, Dear David Cowles, Many years ago, your late wife, Eliza Carmody- The third sheet said, Dear David, My left ear has a small bump on the inside of the curl of cartilage. It's not something people usually notice but Now I heard something outside, or perhaps downstairs in the garage. I'd taken too big a chance as it was- on the premises almost twelve minutes. I dropped the pad of unfinished letters back into the chamber, pressed down on the lid until it clicked shut, and glanced around the room to see that nothing had been disturbed. I slipped out the door and locked it from the outside again, not bothering to kick aside the broken glass — then pushed back inside the door, cursing

myself, and stepped straight to the answering machine. Keeping on my glove, I pressed PLAY.

"Listen, you peckerass!" boomed Poppy's voice through a squall of static, "just pay these guys some fucking blood money, all right? Herschel's family, somebody working for them, are here. They're here! Right here, okay? Found me at the diner this afternoon. Did you tell them I eat there? I don't get it, Jay. They got me. They're listening to every word I'm telling you right now. Said they knew something about Herschel, I said I didn't know what. I said okay I called in the ambulance but he was already dead. They think we killed him! They're not going to the police, either. That's what they say, anyway, what-?" The voice became indistinct. "Yeah, they got- I mean, I told them your phone number, Jay, and where your girlfriend at the steakhouse works, okay? I got to give them something, that's all I got to give, and I don't know what else to say. I told them that's all I know. Just pay them, Jay, just-"

That was it. End of message. My fingers trembled, but I hit the memory button for old messages. Nothing. Time to go. But I didn't. I did one more thing; I dialed my new cell phone from Jay's phone. His number popped up on the display, and I saved it.

This done, I shot out of the room, pulled the door behind me, and scooted down the stairs. I kept my cap low and turned downhill on the street. Had anyone seen me? I caught a getaway taxi on Third Avenue, and the driver flicked on some kind of Indian or Bangladeshi stand-up comedy show. Urmatta-eshi-ohvalindi-halaloo, came a man's voice. Heh-heh, came the response. Durmeshala-burmatta-valnahnah-galod-pulurshindaloo! And then, Heh-heh.

I settled into my seat- Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan would take a while. I didn't want to keep thinking of Jay as an adversary, for clearly he was living under desperate circumstances, to a degree I hadn't realized before. But that same desperation worried me; a man who needs oxygen tanks at night is not as scared of lawsuits and other threat sas is another man. It was also true that my illegal entry of Jay's premises hadn't resulted in any information that would help me deal with Marceno. What, then, had I learned? H.J.'s men were threatening Poppy. I needed to tell Allison to watch out, didn't I? And Jay, involved with Sally Cowles, was trying to draft a strange letter to her father. Had he bought the Reade Street building for some reason involving them? What else? The cartilage in his ear was related to the problem. He had a refrigerator full of black-market pharmaceuticals. He was obsessed with someone or something named FEV.

I leaned across the taxi's partition. The driver glanced in his rearview. "Take me to the New York Public Library," I said.

Varanasi-amattagobi-halapur-geshura-nanaloo!

Heh-heh.

Two hours later I knew that the air humans breathe at sea level is about twenty-one percent oxygen. In polluted American cities such as New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo, the concentration can fall to eighteen percent. Man breathes in about eighteen cubic feet of air per hour, drawing the stuff deep into the sacs of the lungs, making his red blood cells glow as oxygen hits them, and, like a tree or a dog or a worm, returns carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fully a fifth of the oxygen we breathe is consumed by the brain. Not only do we need the stuff, we're made of it: sixty-two percent, by body weight. The lungs grow steadily in children, then quite rapidly during puberty, but also continue to grow after maximum height has been reached. In males, lung capacity may continue to increase up to the age of twenty-five. The greatest variable in maximum lung capacity is, as would be expected, the size of the person, and Jay's theoretical maximum lung capacity was probably about 680 milliliters. But in healthy people the limits of exertion are dictated by the limits of the circulation system, not by the lungs. This is why shorter people can outrun taller people and why Olympic athletes often train at high altitudes to increase their red blood cell concentrations and return to low altitude just prior to competition. For all people, however, lung capacity begins to fall after age thirty. The ability to absorb oxygen is, in fact, one of the medical definitions of aging. The downward curve in our capacity is slow, however, and, in the absence of disease, is usually gentle enough to carry a human being far into old age.

There was more. FEV, the thing Jay wanted so badly not to be obsessed with, stood for forced expiratory volume and was the ratio of an individual's lung capacity to his or her expected healthy lung capacity, given height, age, and sex. A normal FEV score is 85 or higher. The morbid effects of disease can be seen in a low FEV score. The average decline in FEV of long-term smokers, for example, when plotted against non-smokers, is quite dramatic. A heavy smoker in his fifties has often lost so much lung capacity that he or she has reached an FEV rating of 45 or 50, a score that a healthy nonsmoker would not reach until age one hundred, were he to live that long. But slowly smoking a mountain of beautifully poisonous cigarettes is not the only thing that causes a low FEV. Other causes include organic diseases such as severe asthma, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, and environmental irritants, including air pollution, asbestos, and exposure to toxins. These conditions can cause permanent loss of FEV by damaging the elasticity of the lungs and their ability to receive oxygen. They can also cause a reversible, mechanical loss of FEV by simply irritating the bronchial tubes, which both reduces the air that can get into the lungs and causes intense mucus secretion. Judging from the contents of his refrigerator, Jay was doing everything the books mentioned to marginally increase his breathing ability, dosing himself with steroids, bronchial dilators, and whatever else might increase his uptake and utilization of oxygen. His color, I reflected, was usually pretty good, which suggested his self-medication was successful. The inhalers, I read, reduced the sensitivity of lung tissue, and the prednisone actually shrank the tissue. Did he use these drugs constantly or just for intervention when his FEV was dropping? Put differently, what was his unmedicated capacity? That, I suspected, was pretty low- because of the enormous amount of oxygen Jay was using. An FEV below 60, in itself a very bad sign, requires supplemental inhaled oxygen, at least intermittently, and inhaled oxygen, as Jay no doubt knew, is a deal with the devil.

The more often you use inhaled oxygen, the longer you survive. People with low FEV scores on twenty-four-hour oxygen supplementation live longer than do people with the same FEV using oxygen only fifteen hours, and they in turn live longer than people using it only ten hours. And so on. But the more often one uses supplemental oxygen, the more addicted the body becomes to it, and the more constricted one's life. Clearly Jay was trying to avoid using the stuff, even in moments of high exertion- such as swinging a baseball bat, an activity that no doubt gave him pleasure and release and a sense of his former talents. This explained, perhaps, the shortness of his visits to Allison's apartment. It also begged the question of how he had sex with her. Swinging a baseball bat is a lot less rigorous than sex. Did Jay have on an oxygen mask when he was plugging Allison? That seemed unlikely. Freaky and sick, but unlikely. I kept reading. Jay probably needed a backup source of oxygen, and I wondered if the device in the rear of his truck that he used the night we moved the bulldozer might be what the books called an oxygen concentrator, a relatively inexpensive device that pulls oxygen from the atmosphere and stores it.

Because oxygen uptake tends to decrease at night, especially during REM sleep, he was probably using the oxygen tanks mostly then. The hyperbolic chamber, I learned, is used to saturate the tissues of the body with as much oxygen as possible. Its effectiveness occurs in the outer margins of measurable oxygen uptake but it does help prevent certain kinds of infection and stiffening of tissues. Jay was doing everything he could. But no matter what, the books said, FEV keeps dropping, and once it falls below a score of 11, then death is imminent. No wonder Jay was trying not to be obsessed with it.

Walking out of the library, I remembered the mail I'd shoved in my pocket and had a look at it. Marceno had discovered what was now my former address, perhaps through the New York Bar Association, and sent me a request for interrogatories, which is basically a questionnaire used to prepare for a deposition. I threw it in the trash and flipped through the rest of the mail. There was nothing coming to me that I might look forward to, so I didn't expect to see a postcard from Casole d'Elsa, a Tuscan hill town with lovely stone towers hundreds of years old. It was from my son, in his sloppy script:

Dear Dad, Mom doesn't love Robert anymore. She says we might fly to New York City. I know the difference between gelato and ice cream.

Love, Timothy

P.S. Italian kids don't like baseball.

Never have I scrutinized a document like this one. Not when I was studying for the New York State bar, not when I was checking the final contracts for the sale of a $562 million office building in midtown. The fact that Judith had taken my address with her was at least somewhat interesting. What did Judith and Timothy say to each other about me? Did they talk about me, did she ask him if he missed me, did he ask her what I was doing? And how did he know she didn't love Robert anymore? Is this why he wrote the card? Timothy had addressed the card himself, which meant one of two things; that he'd discovered my address among Judith's things, her address book most likely, or whatever trendy little electronic gizmo she used, because he suspected or knew that his communication was forbidden, which meant that he had secreted a stamp and mailed the postcard on the sly, a complicated undertaking for a boy his age. The other possibility was that Judith had simply provided the address to him, which meant that she knew the card was being sent and may well have known its message. Which meant that she sanctioned its existence, which then was a message directly to the husband she'd dumped not so long ago: Our son wants to communicate with you, and this is okay with me. Who knew?

I had an idea. I hurried down to the great sporting goods store a few blocks away, near Grand Central Station, where fathers buy their children birthday presents before taking the train home from work. The store was open until eight. I bought a fielder's glove and a new Yankees cap and packed them, with the ball signed by the great Derek Jeter, five-time All-Star, owner of four World Series championship rings, in a box marked TIMOTHY WYETH, c/o JUDITH WYETH, AMERICAN TOURISTAS EN IL VILLAGGIO D'CASOLE D'ELSA, TUSCANA, ITALIA [POSTINO: PER FAVORE PORTARE. GRAZIE]. Close enough, and not bad for a guy who hadn't been to Italy since the Clinton administration. For a return address I taped one of my new business cards to the box. Judith would scrutinize the card, see if the address was a good one, inspect the quality of the paper. If the box arrived, that is. But I liked my chances. I've been to these little Tuscan hill towns. There's generally one post office, a public servant dutifully selling stamps, weighing packages. Nobody is in a hurry but everything gets done. The winter season is the slow time in Tuscany, very few foreign tourists. An American woman like Judith would stand out.

I took the box to an international overnight shipper.

"American tourists in a small Italian town?" said the clerk.

"Yes, the husband is an executive of an American company."

"He might be getting business mail from the States on a regular basis then?"

"Quite possibly, yes."

"Our guy over there might know who it is." He shrugged. "You never know."

Good enough. You have to shoot to score, you have to hunt to kill.

There's a nice hotel around the corner from the Public Library, the Bryant Park, and they had a room, the desk clerk said. Just the place to hide for a night or two. He asked about my luggage and I said I had none. "Late meeting at the office," I lied. "And a very early one tomorrow." He met this statement with a shrug. A few minutes later I stood at the window, watching the traffic. After my lunch with Dan Tuthill the option of going to the police about the destruction of my apartment seemed even less advisable. If he caught wind of it, Dan would rescind his job offer immediately. Lawyers breaking laws end up not practicing. No, I needed to surf and wriggle and duck my way through the problem. They'd found Poppy. Martha Hallock was coming into the city tomorrow. I'd meet her and take her to the steakhouse, try to talk to Allison again. As for Jay, I pulled out my cell phone and called. Nothing. The machine picked up the call, beeped with no message. I left my number. He could be anywhere. He could be with Allison, I realized. Maybe he was in the oxygen chamber and couldn't hear the call. Aside from his daily medications, though, he seemed to have no schedule, no routine I could anticipate, just circling around Sally Cowles. I recalled his fragment of a letter to her father about the cartilage in his own ear. Did he have a hearing problem? Did Sally? Not if she practiced the piano, not if I knew where I'd find Jay.