When the Thrill Is Gone

20

By 5:09 I was out of bed. I took my clothes from the closet, picked up my shoes and socks from the floor, and made my way out of the bedroom, lumbering but silent — like a bear.

Twill and I approached the dining room door at the same moment. He was wearing black pants and shoes, scarlet socks and a light-gray linen shirt. His dark smile was welcome even if his hour of reentry was not.

“Where’ve you been?” were the first words from my mouth.

“Out with Ginko and his friends,” he said. “You up early, Pops.”

“Your mother worries,” I answered.

“I’m sorry, man.”

“You could call.”

“I promise I will, from this day on,” he said and I knew it was true. Twill didn’t always tell the truth, but he used a certain tone when making commitments.

“What are you into, boy?”

“Nuthin’. Just havin’ some fun.”

He looked at me and I hunched my shoulders. He was the last fighter a slugger like me wanted to meet in the ring. Didn’t have much of a punch but he could hit you all night long, and all you’d connect with was air.

I took a cab down to Winston’s Diner to get my breakfast — and, hopefully, a glimpse of Aura. I knew she dropped in there sometimes to get her coffee before work — usually about seven.

But that hour came and went and all I had was the New York Times to keep me company. A man in Queens was caught building a fertilizer bomb in his basement. He planned to blow up his entire block; would have succeeded, too, if the guy who logged gas usage hadn’t noticed some of the telltale signs of bombmaking in the trash outside the garage.

The greatest natural disaster in the history of the world has been the human brain. Get rid of us and Eden will return unaided.

“Here you go,” said the strawberry blond waitress from the day before.

I had ordered fried pork chops, a short stack of oat pancakes, two eggs over easy, and a patty of grated and fried potato.

I ate my poisonous meal with hot sauce, maple syrup, and black pepper — all the while watching her dancer’s body move from counter to table, table to kitchen.

There was an emptiness in my chest that Nate Chambers had created by yanking the hatred out of there. No food or lust could fill that empty space.

“Anything else?” the waitress asked me.

“No,” I said, clipping the word down to its shortest syllabic span.

I wanted to ask her to come have dinner with me that night. I needed something, but it wasn’t her.

The check was $21.46. I left a twenty and a ten under it, hoping that maybe the next time I came she would ask me about my needs again.

The red-brick building took up the whole center part of the south block of D, north of First. I spied the rooftop stand of slender white tree trunks from the corner.

Approaching the eight-story building from across the street, I noticed a few things immediately. First, it was more like a fortress than the surrounding, gentrifying apartments and condos. The windows on the first and second floors were all blocked in different ways. There were grids and barbed wire, horizontal, vertical, and even slanted bars used.

Some of the upper windows were open. On the seventh floor a large woman was sitting on the sill, looking down at me looking up at her.

Crossing the street, I noted that the front door, actually a barricade, was fretted and strapped with forbidding green metal. There was no button or even a knocker to request entrée. The spraypaint red graffiti on the door read FREEDOM’S RESERVATION.

Why couldn’t I catch a normal case, a woman who runs away from her bourgeois husband with the janitor, living in a Jersey motel and dreaming about coming home?

I knocked on the door. It sounded like a three-year-old pounding on a pillow.

No one answered, so I waited.

Patience is one of my best qualities. I have sat in my classic car for days on the slim hope of catching a quick look at a cheating wife or a bail jumper’s yellow shirt. But patience is not my only virtue; I can also take a punch, or a hint, go for years without love or relief, and I can face Death in the eye and hardly flinch. Not only can I stand up under pain, but I can ignore the pain others feel. I always pay my debts but rarely act out of a desire for personal revenge.

Given all that talent, I could stand out in front of that red-brick arboretum for hours with no anxiety or rancor to get in the way.

A lonely seagull cried in my pocket.

“Hello, Aura,” I said after three heartbreaking exclamations. “I was at Winston’s this morning.”

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

I could face Death, but Aura made my chest quiver.

“Oh?” I said, fooling no one.

“I love you, Leonid.”

Those few words created a fissure deep down in the soul my father declared did not exist.

I was searching for an answer when a youngish white man clad in varying shades of green walked up to the fortified door. I say young, but he might have been all of forty with the youth preserved in his eyes and skin. There was something mirthful about him — a demeanor fit for one of Robin Hood’s merry men of legend.

“I got to go, Aura,” I said.

I disconnected the call before she could respond. It wasn’t a conscious act. Was this the warrior’s reflex my father was talking about?

Even the newcomer’s straw hat was green. His pants were olive and his T-shirt teal. His shoes and socks were crayon green.

His eyes were brown and they gauged me. If there was suspicion there I missed it, hidden behind a smile that was both practiced and natural.

He reminded me of the Artful Dodger. In my mind, that’s what I dubbed him.

He nodded out of simple civility, removed a tiny green phone from his shirt pocket, and made the call.

We watched each other and waited five seconds.

“Fledermaus at the door,” he said, “with someone who wants in, it seems.”

“I knocked but no one answered,” I said to the Dodger as he pocketed the cell phone.

“Fledermaus,” he replied.

“That a name or a code word?”

“They never let anybody in.”

“What are you waiting for, then?”

“I’m somebody.”

“Doesn’t a somebody have visitors now and then?”

“They have to be on guard for police spies,” he told me. “The previous owner of the building died with no heirs. The current residents are pioneers who have claimed the property, but the cops work for the bosses and want to take their squat away.”

There was my father again, this time lecturing me and my brother Nikita about the Paris Commune and what Engels did to free the workers.

“You say ‘they,’ ”I said. “Aren’t you one of them?”

“I’m a friend of a lot of people down around here,” he said. “They ask me to do favors now and again.”

“I have to speak to the woman who hired me,” I said. “A Shawna Chambers. Her mother told me to look for her here.”

“If you work for her why did her mother have to tell you where she lived?”

“Ask her, and send somebody down with an answer.” I was turning serious, a natural reaction against that perpetual smile.

My phone chirped.

“Shawna?” the Dodger asked.

“That’s all — and everything,” I told him.

The door pulled inward. There were at least seven men standing in the entranceway.

Fledermaus nodded to me and winked before making it through the mob and into the building. I considered trying to bull my way in but nixed the notion.

“Tell her that it’s Leonid McGill,” I said before the heavy door slammed in my face.

On the glass face of my cell phone the words These waters run deep glared in black and gray. It was a message from Aura.

I stood there, wishing I still had a father to hate.