The Long Fall

11

One thing I’ve learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there’s a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us—each and every day of our lives. There’s drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there’s banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck.

I once knew a woman named Gert Longman. She had a place down in SoHo. I used to stay there sometimes. One morning, when she had alre ^ knady left for work, I was drinking coffee on her fire escape when a car came careening down the street. A mother and her young son were crossing and the car slammed into them. For a moment it seemed that the car was going to stop to help but then he, or she, stepped on the gas, ran over the bodies, and was gone. I climbed down the fire-escape ladder, but when I got to them I could see that they were dead, very much so. I called 911 and the ambulance came crying. The police arrived a few minutes later and I told them everything I could.

That was a tough day for me. I was so upset that I went home. Katrina had taken the kids to visit her parents in their Miami retirement condo, so I brooded alone in the apartment, worried about Death behind the wheel of a red car, rushing up on you out of nowhere and then hurrying away like a coward. I got in the bathtub with a book but forgot my drink on the sink. I got one foot on the floor and slipped, did a James Brown split, flew up in the air, and landed hard. My skull grazed the edge of the iron tub. And even though the pain in my head and hip was excruciating, I lay there laughing at myself. I had forgotten that Death was watching from all sides; that it comes at you from the place you least expect.

And so even though a gangster had me in his crosshairs, I still had a life to live just like every other doomed soul walking this earth, wondering if he could make it across the street.

I TOOK A bus downtown and got off three blocks from Tiny Bateman’s Charles Street address.

Charles was a narrow street of mostly four- to six-story apartment buildings built of brick and thickly coated with decades of city grime. Most had concrete stoops and little barred gates that led down to the basements. Tiny worked in an underground apartment half a block from Hudson Street. I descended the seven granite stairs and gave that week’s secret code. I felt like a fool with a magic decoder ring but Tiny would never answer unless I tattooed the right sequence on his buzzer.

After three minutes there was a loud click and I pushed open the reinforced steel door that was painted a fanciful shamrock green.

It was more of a compartment than an apartment. Each room, even the toilet, had worktables along the walls. These tables were crowded with wires and chip boards, computers without casings and cameras that looked like ceramic dolls, single-cigar humidors, a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, and other, less recognizable items. There were clusters of cell phones on the tables; some were wired to computers, others wired together. Tiny could do things with modern technology that even the inventors had not yet imagined. He supplied people like me with surveillance tools, hacked information, and general advice. Most of his work was done over the Internet but he allowed a select few into his dark and dusty domain.

I passed through three packed rooms before coming to Tiny’s office. This had once been the master bedroom of the subterranean abode. Huge light-gray, plastic-encased computers lined the southern wall. They were humming and throwing off a lot of heat, I was sure, but Tiny had enough air-conditioning running to freeze a penguin.

The fat young caramel-colored man was seated in a swive cted

“Hey, Tiny,” I said.

I didn’t sit because there was no visitor’s chair in Tiny’s laboratory. He once told me that he only ever had four visitors. I didn’t know the others’ names but it was a good bet that one of them was his father.

Simon Bateman had introduced me to his nerd-to-the-max son. I helped the elder Bateman once when he was in serious trouble, and he paid me by getting Bug to agree to work for me now and again.

“How’d that phone work out?” the thirty-something misanthrope asked in a high voice that seemed to want to get higher.

“Fine. Fine. I think I might need another couple soon.”

“The blue and pink ones near the front door,” he said.

Bug owned, and slept in, the apartment above his workplace. The people he did business with dropped their deliveries and picked up their orders in a sealed antechamber that he constructed up there. That way he didn’t have to see anyone for weeks at a time.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

“ ’Bout what?”

I explained about the e-mails that Twill had sent and received.

“I’m worried about my son,” I said.

“Maybe he’s got a good reason,” Tiny said, removing the glasses that had earned him the insect nickname.

His eyes were small and his fleshy limbs chubby. He was both the technically smartest and physically unhealthiest person I’d ever known.

Tiny called himself a techno-anarchist. He believed that humanity would slowly separate into what he called monadic particulates : self-sufficient individuals who depended only upon technology and their relationship with it.

“I’m not gonna have my son out there murdering people, Tiny. No way.”

“Twill’s a smart kid,” the self-made scientist said. “Maybe he could get away with it.”

“I need to know everything about the person he’s communicating with,” I said, cutting off any further discussion.

Tiny drew up his shoulders and nodded, submitting to my demand. Despite his particulate aspirations, Tiny’s father was his lifeline, and Simon owed me big.

I WALKED FROM Tiny’s to a small bar on East Houston named the Naked Ear. It was a place where I used to drink with Gert before she was murdered. Back then it had been a neighborhood bar that sponsored poetry readings after ten but now it catered to twenty-something stockbrokers who made more in a week than I did in three months.

If I got there early enough I could get a corner table, away from the crowd of flirty children. There I would down my cognac, toasting a memory.

I DRANK UNTIL standing up was a serious challenge but still I managed to stumble out into the street and hail a cab.

That night I remembered to call Katrina, so she was in bed when I got home. I dropped my jacket in the hallway and kicked off my shoes in the dining room. On the way to our bedroom I looked in on Twill. I didn’t do that because he was my favorite (even though he is) but because Twill often went out at night when the rest of us were asleep. And when Twill was on the prowl there was no telling what mischief he’d get into.

But that evening he was sound asleep under a thin blanket. I smiled at him and staggered off to bed.

KATRINA WAS SNORING and the TV was on. My wife could not sleep without the drone of the television, so I dropped the rest of my clothes on the floor and rolled into my side of the bed.

I lay there in an alcoholic stupor, not really worried about anything. I had to do something about The Suit’s problem, and there was Twill to worry about. But there was nothing I could do right then and so I stared into the bright glare of the TV screen, hoping that sleep would ambush me.

“. . . murder in lower Manhattan this evening,” a woman reporter was saying. The image of a clean-cut and youngish black face appeared on the screen behind her. The face looked vaguely familiar. “Frank Tork, only hours out on bail from police custody, was found beaten and strangled to death in a small alley off of Maiden Lane this evening. Mr. Tork was awaiting sentencing on a burglary conviction. Police say that an investigation is under way . . .”

I lifted my head to get a better look but then the dizziness from seven or maybe eleven shots of brandy pushed me down into unconsciousness.

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