The Patriots' Club

11

Yoda was waiting on the kitchen counter when Bolden stepped through the door. “Awake, are you? Did you not sleep?”

The giant orange tabby stared at him and yawned. Bolden walked past him, into the small kitchen, and turned on the light. “Want milk, do you?”

Yoda raised his paw and kept it there.

Bolden set a saucer on the floor and poured in some milk. “May the Force be with you, too.”

There were eleven messages on his answering machine. The tenth said, “Thomas, um, hi. It’s three-thirty. I’ve checked all the hospitals for you, but you’re not there. I’m at home. Call me as soon as you get this. Love you.”

Bolden dialed Jenny’s house. She answered on the first ring. “Thomas? Where are you?”

“Hi, it’s me,” he said. “I’m at home. I’m okay.”

“Where have you been? I was worried.”

“It’s a long story, but I’m fine. Sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“It’s okay. I got your last message. Where’d you go, anyway? I waited on the street for twenty minutes, then the police officer insisted I go to the hospital.”

“I got your watch back.”

Silence. Bolden heard a sob, then a muted laugh. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He wanted her there with him, instead of at her place.

“Let’s have lunch,” he suggested. “We can talk about it then.”

“I can come over now.”

“I’ve got to be at work by eight. There’s that Jefferson deal I told you about.”

“Don’t go,” Jenny said. “I’ll take a day, too. Come over to my place.”

“Can’t do it,” he said, hating how he sounded like an uptight jerk.

“I need you,” she said, and her voice had dropped into another tone altogether. “Come over. Now.”

“Jen, it’s a big deal. People are coming in from D.C. There’s no way I can miss it.”

Jenny sighed. “Okay, lunch then,” she said, too soberly. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

“Hint?”

“Never. But I’m warning you. I may hijack you afterward.”

“If things go well with Jefferson, I may let you. Lunch. Twelve sharp.”

“Regular place?”

“Regular place,” he confirmed. “And you? Your arm? Only ten stitches.”

“How did you know?”

Bolden turned on the television. It was tuned to CNBC, the sound muted, and for a minute, he just sat there and stared at the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen. The long bond was up. North Sea crude down a dollar. The Nikkei had closed up fifty.

His vision blurred.

Crown. Bobby Stillman.

Bolden closed his eyes, forcing the words from his mind, turning the volume on Guilfoyle’s lifeless voice down to zero. The fact that five hours ago a man had aimed a pistol squarely at his face and fired a bullet that missed him by a few inches, the fact that he had been made to stand on a naked girder seventy stories above the ground, the fact that he had attacked a man on that girder and toppled into a net sixty feet below it that in all honesty he hadn’t been sure was there-all of this seemed impossible and distant. It couldn’t really have happened. Not during the same day that had begun with him eating breakfast with clients at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and continued right through his donning a tuxedo for the gala dinner and giving Jenny her anniversary present on the steps of Federal Hall.

He opened his eyes and stared at the numbers scrolling on the TV screen. If gold cost $460 an ounce in London, he could be sure it was the truth. If the long bond was trading at five and three teenies, he could believe that, too. The numbers were real. He could trust them. But it didn’t make sense that someone would try to kill him because they believed he knew something that, in fact, he did not. He couldn’t trust what he couldn’t understand, so he had to forget it. To wipe the events from his mind. Bolden knew how to forget.

After a while, he decided he had better try and eat something. It was going to be a busy day, and an important one. Responsibility tugged at him like an undertow, something he couldn’t see but was powerless to overcome. He shuffled to the refrigerator and took out some eggs, pepper jack cheese, diced ham, and a half-gallon of orange juice. From the pantry, he doled out five thousand milligrams of vitamin C and four Advils.

After preparing his breakfast, he sat down on his piano bench and shoveled the eggs into his mouth. Yoda jumped up next to him and he fed the cat a sliver of ham. Finished, he set the plate on the floor. Yoda was on it in a flash. A cat who liked eggs and pepper jack cheese. Maybe that explained why he weighed twelve pounds.

Crown. Bobby Stillman. Forget it. Forget it all.

Twisting on the bench, he hit a note with his index finger. The piano was a beaut, an antique Chickering upright. Above it hung an original poster of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Jimmy Cagney winking at him from the haze of seventy years. He ran his hand along the ivory keyboard. “Chopsticks” was as far as his talent went. Once he’d made his bundle, though, he’d take some lessons. He wanted to be good enough to play three songs well: that music from Charlie Brown, the “Maple Leaf Rag,” by Scott Joplin, and the Moonlight Sonata. Tommy Bolden playing Beethoven. Even now, half exhausted, the idea made him smile.

The clock on the oven read 6:10 as he deposited the plate in the sink and ran some hot water over it. He walked into the living room and collapsed onto the couch, staring out the window at the East River. Beyond it, the concrete flats of Queens huddled like a cell block beneath the gray sky. He looked around the apartment that he’d moved into four years ago. At the time, all his possessions had fit into three suitcases and a half dozen moving boxes, not including his Naugahyde La-Z-Boy recliner, his Lava lamp, and his framed poster of Zeppelin jamming at Madison Square Garden.

That stuff was long gone.

Jenny’s first crusade was to give him taste. Taste was not innate, it was learned. Taste was a burgundy sofa and an art deco wall mirror. Taste was an original Eames recliner and a seven-foot Kentia palm. Taste was the Cagney poster, which had once hung in the lobby of the Biograph Theater in Times Square. Taste was afternoons trawling Greenwich Village’s countless antique shops and furniture dealers in search of… the right thing. Taste, he had learned, was spending lots of money to make it look like you hadn’t spent lots of money at all.

One soggy fall Saturday, after a visit to an antique store he was sure they’d visited the week before, Bolden rebelled. It was his turn, he said. That day taste was a Macintosh receiver with two hundred watts per channel, a pair of JBL studio monitors to blow them back to the Stone Age, and the Stones cranking out “Midnight Rambler” (live) at eighty decibels. Taste was a bottle of cheap Chianti, spaghetti with Ragú tomato sauce, a loaf of hot garlic bread dripping with butter, and his old college comforter spread across the living-room floor on which to enjoy it all. Taste was making love as the lights of Manhattan came to life around them, and crowding into a steaming-hot bathtub afterward.

Bolden’s eyes walked the floor where they had lain curled up under his frayed all-purpose comforter, and came to rest on the candle she had made for him out of the Chianti bottle, the kind with straw wrapped around the bottom and wax drippings down the sides.

“Terrible taste. Terrific memory,” Jenny had said.

He missed her.

Thinking of the kiss that had accompanied the candle, he closed his eyes and laid his head on the cushion. He needed to rest. Just for a few minutes. Ten or fifteen…

Bolden dreamed. He stood in the center of a large room, surrounded by a circle of boys, teenagers really. He knew them all. Gritsch, Skudlarek, Feely, Danis, Richens, and the rest of them from the Dungeon. They were stamping their feet on the wooden floor, chanting his name. He looked down and saw the body on the floor in front of him. He bent down and turned it over. It was Coyle. He was dead, his neck grotesquely twisted, his eyes and mouth open. “It was an accident,” a sixteen-year-old Bolden shouted. “An accident!”

The circle of boys closed in on him, chanting his name. All were holding pistols. The same gun that Guilfoyle had pointed at his head. They raised their arms. Bolden felt the barrel pressed to his forehead. They fired.

The gun!

Bolden woke with a start. It was then that the image came to him. A memory from the night just past. He rushed across the living room to his desk, a nineteenth-century secretary. A legal pad sat on top of it. He found a pen and began to sketch the tattoo he had seen on the chest of the man who had wanted him dead. The first drawing was terrible and looked like a misshapen dog bone. He tore off the paper, wadded it up, and chucked it into the wastebasket. He started again, working slower. A sturdy stock led into a long, tapered barrel. Finished with the outline, he colored it in. Still terrible, but he had captured the idea more or less. He held up the drawing for examination.

An old-fashioned rifle, circa 1800. Something Daniel Boone would carry. A frontiersman’s rife. No, not a rifle, he corrected himself.

A musket.