When the Thrill Is Gone

21

Alone again, I wondered if the merry man called Fledermaus would deliver my message. Even if he did, Shawna might not appreciate me finding out who she wasn’t. There was almost definitely a variety of other exits she could use to avoid me. But, I reasoned, a woman with six children couldn’t run as easily as a woman alone — again, like me.

The phone now growled in my pocket.

“Hello?”

“Mr. McGill?”

“Ms. Koen,” I said. “Anything you need?”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Put him on.”

“Kid?” Gordo said in my ear.

“What’s up, old man?”

“I got a call from Firpo. He said that Iran had some rough visitors up at the gym today. Lucky for Eye, he was out. They told Firpo to keep quiet about them bein’ there, but he called me first thing.”

Firpo was a jazz musician, a tuba player turned janitor. The tragedy of the human brain is that it is aware of what it has lost and where it’s headed — both at the same time.

The barricade door swung inward and a solitary man blossomed forth.

“I got to go, Gord,” I said. “I’ll look into it right after I finish what I’m doin’ now.”

“Cool.”

The forty-something man was white and extra-large with hard muscles that proudly exhibited their definition. Six foot even, he was completely bald, had a variety of facial scars, and the blue tattoo of curling barbed wire trailing off from the left corner of his mouth down past the collar of his incongruous pink T-shirt. The look on the big man’s face was designed to instill fear.

I smiled for him.

“Who are you?” he asked in a guttural Muscovite accent.

“Leonid,” I said, pronouncing the word as some Russians might.

It was his turn to smile. His teeth had been stained by coffee, cigarettes, and the bitter taste of state domination.

“Ivan,” he said. “Ivan Beria.”

“Any relation?”

“Ve are all brothers, are ve not, comrade?” he said, exaggerating his accent.

“I’m here to see Shawna Chambers.”

“She is not here.”

“But she lives here, right?” I asked. “Maybe I could wait till she gets back.”

“Go away.”

“Happy to, Comrade Beria, but I’ll be back with the cops in under an hour unless I see Shawna in the next five minutes.”

“I don’t care about police.”

“You should. Down in Philadelphia they blew up a house of squatters, mostly kids. You think you had it bad in the Old Country, but we have a saying here in America — wherever you go, there you are.”

My tone, more than the information, worried the communal ex-Communist.

“Shawna is gone.”

I didn’t like the finality of his tone.

“What about her kids?” I asked.

“They are children.”

“Either I talk to Shawna or her kids right now or the police with their helicopters and bombs will be at your doorstep for lunch.”

From the threat in his eyes I could believe that this man was a descendant of the chief of Stalin’s secret police. Luckily for me, the NKVD was no longer in power and we were on American soil.

“Come with me,” the big man said.

He turned and walked past the vestibule and into the ground-floor hallway of the fortress.

I’m short but wide. My shoulders would easily fit on a man of Beria’s height. His shoulders were sculpted for a giant. I followed him to a small elevator where we squeezed in and he tapped the button for the top floor.

It took a good deal of courage to keep my hands from fidgeting on the ride. I have severe claustrophobia issues, and small elevators in the company of men named after a mass murderer, serial killer, and rapist went to the top of my list of places to avoid. Heat radiated from Beria’s pink chest as did an odor that reminded me of the barn my father, brother, and I slept in when we used to go to a private retreat in Appalachia for firearms practice with everything from .22-caliber long-barreled pistols to grenade launchers.

When the whiny door slid open I had to be mindful not to sigh.

The Russian led me down a long hall of apartments that ended at a door he pushed open.

This domicile was a surprisingly spacious room with high ceilings and many windows. A middle-aged woman from India was sitting at one of the windows, looking out. There were, I decided, many sentries at Freedom’s Reservation. Around her was a group of six variously colored children — the oldest of whom was a girl of seven, or maybe eight. The youngest child, a boy, was whimpering on the oldest’s lap.

All the kids were looking up at me and Beria with both fear and awe in their faces. All except the elder girl — a golden-skinned, copper-haired beauty — whose only defense against men like us was defiance.

“Do you recognize this man?” Beria asked the kids.

I thought the question was odd at first, but then, I thought, why wouldn’t they know one of their mother’s acquaintances?

At first the children didn’t respond.

“Fatima,” the Indian woman said.

“No,” said the golden-skinned leader of the small tribe.

“Have you seen her sister — Chrystal?” I asked.

“Aunt Chris went on a cruise,” Fatima replied, looking up at me.

“Your mom asked me to do Aunt Chris a favor,” I said, “but I wasn’t able to find her. So I came here to ask your mom what I should do next.”

I was just talking. The agreement between myself and the child had already been struck. That look she gave me was one I’d seen many times in my client’s chair.

Please help me, Mr. McGill.

The Indian babysitter and the Russian son of perdition stared down on the children, restraining them with their wills.

“Do you know where your mother is right now?” I asked Fatima.

The woman shook her head almost imperceptibly. Fatima cast a glance at her and then bowed, shaking her head at the floor.

“Can I speak to you outside for a moment?” I said to Beria.

He grunted and turned.

He was out the door first and I came just after. I allowed him to pull the unlocked portal shut before hitting him solidly in the gut. That right hook was executed just the way Rocky Marciano was teaching it in the Ph.D. program for pugilism up in heaven — or wherever. But I didn’t rest on my laurels. I hit him three more times in the midsection, threw two uppercuts to his face, and then landed a straight right on the tip of his chin.

He was unconscious before the last blow, falling to the floor with a heaviness that was indicative of insensibility. I wasn’t proud of myself. Hitting a man who is unaware of your intentions is the act of a coward, but as the referee of life says, Protect yourself at all times.

I turned my head to look down the hall. Fledermaus was standing there, three large steps out of reach. I thought about running toward him. A mind reader, he put up his hands in mock surrender. I looked back at Beria. He was going to be out for a while longer. So I opened the door to the apartment and walked in.

“Ivan wants to see you outside,” I said to the Indian nursemaid.

She approached me suspiciously. I held the door for her and slammed it as soon as she cleared the threshold.

I could hear her muffled cry from the hallway but that was of no concern to me. It was a heavy door and there was a bolt, so I threw it. There was also a lock, which I turned.

The children had organized themselves behind Fatima. She was standing behind her stool, the dark-skinned two-year-old boy in her arms.

“Where’s your mother, honey?” I asked the girl.

“Are you going to save us?” she asked.

“I’m gonna try my best.”

“She’s gone away to sleep.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night. I was asleep and then I woke up and saw the man... he was climbing out the window.”

“Did he take her with him?”

She shook her head, holding back the tears with that motion.

“Then where is she?”

“Beria and them took her to the compost heap behind the People’s Garden over at St. Matthew’s. They put blindfolds on us to take us there but Boaz recognized it because the one time he ran away that’s where he hid.”

“But she was... asleep before then?”

Her nod had all the slow solemnity of a funeral march.

Somebody knocked on the door — with a battering ram.