The Long Fall

30

Where Christian’s cubicle was barren and undersized, his boss’s grand hall of an office was a study in opulence. Thick burgundy carpets ran between royal-blue walls upon which hung Renaissance masterpieces lit from the ceiling by spotlights, artwork on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which has a policy of not lending out its possessions).

Ten steps into the room I passed a fully stocked mahogany bar built into the wall on the right. Across the way, on the left, was an altar carved from a solid block of apple-green-and-white jadeite. This sacred stand was tall as a man and twice as wide. Images of faces and animal forms, gracefully understated, flowed across the priceless sculpture.

There was no window, no portal to the outside world, but a green, red, and blue songbird with long, drooping feathers sang out gloriously as I passed. It was a greeting, or possibly a warning, but regardless the tune subsided before I had taken the final twenty-three steps to Alphonse Rinaldo’s desk.

He was standing behind a dining-table-sized piece of furniture made from a single plank of unfamiliar dark wood. He always stood when I entered the room. Maybe he did that with everyone—I don’t know.

Alphonse was of medium height (that is to say an inch or three taller than I), with flawless medium-white skin, black hair, and hard dark eyes. To the casual observer he might have seemed to be of a mild temper, but many of the worst monsters I’ve known were like that: pleasant even in the regrettable act of murder.

His hair, which was neither long nor short, was perfectly coiffed, and his suit would have turned Giorgio Armani’s head.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.” If quicksilver could talk it would sound like him.

The chair I preferred, Alphonse had once told me, was pre-Columbian, carved from a single piece of volcanic rock.

“It was used for sacrifices,” he’d said on that day a few years earlier. “There was a tray that lö

I suppose I must have looked a little uncomfortable, because he added, “Don’t worry, Mr. McGill, it was used exclusively on virgins.”

I had once asked Rinaldo if he answered directly to the mayor.

“I am the special assistant to the City of New York,” he answered as if there were a grim god that lived under the stone and steel, concrete and grime, of the city, a god whose will carried more weight than any politician or generation of voters.

And if Manhattan was an ancient deity set to oversee our island and its neighbors, then Alphonse Rinaldo was an errant angel thrown down among swine. He could buy your soul from a third party and send it twirling like a glass top on the granite stairs of justice. He was without peer, the most dangerous man in New York City. And he almost always knew more than anyone else in the room.

I HAD DONE the special assistant a favor some years before. There was a certain gentleman named Todd who had so much money that he owned a sprawling single-story home set atop a midtown skyscraper and encased in one-way glass. He could see out but the world could not see in.

Todd’s daughter was in love with a man the family considered beneath them. I was brought in to incriminate the gentleman in question. They had considered “other means” of dealing with the problem, but in the final analysis Todd didn’t want his daughter to suffer distress.

Alphonse asked me to find or manufacture evidence that would convince the daughter of her lover’s turpitude (Alphonse’s word, not mine). It was a complex job because even though the boyfriend may have been seen as low class by the Todds, he belonged to another kind of family that wielded a great deal of very raw, very physical power.

Alphonse was well aware of the situation and had reasons within reasons for me to be successful, and not . . . but that’s another story.

In the end no one was happy, but I had made a connection with the Important Man, and so from time to time I did him favors, and he paid me back in kind.

I hadn’t seen Rinaldo since deciding to go from crooked to only slightly bent, so it was a tricky business, me asking for a favor today when I might well have to turn him down tomorrow. But the way I saw it, I had to live through today in order to suffer the ramifications of later on.

“WHAT CAN I do for you, Mr. McGill?” Rinaldo was all about the business. If he had friends, I wasn’t one of them. He didn’t care about my health or my day.

“I need to find one guy and get to another one.”

“People I care about?”

“I doubt it.”

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“People that matter to the city?”

“Maybe. It might be that I can help your people clean up one mess and get myself out of another one.”

I respected his receptionist, Christian, that’s a fact. He was one of a kind, a man who lived in his own estimation of the world. People like him were the only real people, in my opinion. I respected Christian but I was, in spite of myself, in awe of Alphonse Rinaldo. The secretly ordained city manager had a preternatural aura around him. He never wasted a movement, or a word. Sometimes he did things that I didn’t understand, but I knew there was a good reason behind his every action, or inaction.

He didn’t ask me what I meant. He just waited for the evidence to make itself known.

I was good but not on the level of Alphonse. I had made it all the way to his den, but I still had doubts.

“I don’t mean to rush you,” he said after maybe thirty seconds of my silent second thoughts, “but the attaché to the newly elected president of Russia is due to show up in nine minutes.”

He wasn’t bragging so much as showing me my place in the scheme of things.

“I need a pass to get into Larchmont State Prison, to get an hour alone with an inmate named William Nilson. His nickname is Toolie. And . . . ” I hesitated again. My old life was teeming around my ears, a swarm of killer bees casting a shadow and humming a dirge. “. . . and I want to know the whereabouts of a guy, a man, an accountant named A Mann.”

“Are you sure you want to find this man?”

“Yeah. Why? You know something?”

“You just seem a little doubtful.”

“Life is uncertain, isn’t it, Mr. Rinaldo?”

That got me a three-second smile.

“His first name?”

“The vowel.”

He reached under his desk and picked away at something. It took all of a minute. Then he stood up.

That was the drill. I stood up, too. I was supposed to leave then. As with Harris Vartan, it was important in Rinaldo’s ether that the people he dealt with picked up on the subtle nuances of his gestures. That’s why I was surprised when a quizzical expression crossed his face.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just thinking,” he said, sounding almost human.

“ ’Bout what?”

<û="1mandiv height="1em" width="1em" align="justify">“You and Christian are the only two black men, American-born black men, that have ever been in this office. Do you find that strange?”

“Only thing strange is that you realize it.”

He didn’t offer a hand and neither did I. I took the couple of dozen steps back the way I’d come and exited that particular conduit to hell.

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