When the Thrill Is Gone

30

Back out on Bleecker Street — with its tourist shops and old-time Italian specialty markets, its storefront fortune-tellers and overpriced clothes designers — I wondered about time and the people who wasted it. Almost every hour of every day was a wasteland of TVs, radios, lying newspapers, and people like Bertrand Arnold railing against his predestined fate. It wouldn’t matter so much if the malingerers of the world didn’t want to drag me into their ditherings. What did I care about the newest reality show about truckers or bail bondsmen? What did it matter to me if a cow in New Zealand gave birth to the world’s first three-headed calf or who my wife cuckolded me with?

Why would a man having an affair with someone’s wife reveal her infidelity to him? Could revenge heal his broken heart or mend Katrina’s errant ways? If I shot D’Walle, whoever he was, would Bertrand have gotten what he wanted?

It was like blasting a cloud of butterflies with a shotgun because you were earthbound and jealous — it made no sense and was a waste of the little time we had to make sense in.

Thinking these thoughts, feeling the weight of the pistol in my jacket pocket, I found that I had walked across town to Broadway and was on my way north. My thoughts were fragmented and weightless. It was the state of mind a boxer is put in by a solid right hand to the side of his head. Things are a-jumble but he knows that there’s one important fact that needs immediate attention. Maybe there was a three-headed calf somewhere, but that knowledge won’t help the situation.

Keep your gloves up, Gordo shouted at every arrogant young boxer who thought he was too fast, too slick to get hit. But even the thought of Gordo sent me veering off course. The man who took the place of my father... dying in the same room where I had planned the demolition of many an innocent, and not so innocent, life.

This last thought arrived with me at the front door of Aura Ullman’s apartment building. Instinct and a sense of duty had brought me there. The children were my clients now and their mother’s death was my job.

“Yes?” came the answer to my ring.

“Aura?”

“Leonid,” she said as the buzzer sounded.

She was at the open door when I got there, the sun flooding into the hallway from behind her. She smiled and held out both hands to me. I took them, pulled ever so slightly, and felt her ambivalent resistance.

“Come in,” she said.

The living room was a mess. Children’s clothes and toys, coloring books and storybooks strewn here and there. There were smudges on the TV screen and a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a paper plate set on a chair that belonged in the dining room.

Aura smiled and I learned something about her: she loved the disarray of children.

“I had to buy clothes for all of them,” she said proudly. “They said that you took them away without time to pack.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

She smiled and gestured toward the wall-sized window that looked down on the private park.

In a small clearing Theda and Fatima were leading the brood in a lopsided circle dance. Theda held the littlest boy, Uriah, and Boaz carried his smallest sister. They were laughing and singing.

Aura smiled down on them.

“Thank you, Leonid,” she said.

“I love you,” I replied.

“Let’s sit down.”

I sat in a blue cushioned chair and she on the off-white sofa that had suffered some stains in the last twenty-four hours.

Noticing me notice the spots, she said, “I can get the furniture reupholstered after you’ve found their aunt.”

I wanted to ask her what she’d found out from Fatima and her little clan but there was a question on the table.

“There’s no time for us, Leonid,” she said.

“I can make time.”

“No,” she said, “you can’t. You’ve got too much to do, too many irons in the fire.”

“We could leave New York. I’d do that for you.”

“I can’t allow myself to go there,” she said. “Please... be my friend for the time being.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe forever.”

I had killed men with my bare hands, taken enough punishment to have died many times over myself. I had enemies and a special policeman assigned to bring me down and send me to prison. There were people suffering at that very moment because I had framed them. And yet there I was — a teenager with a gaping heart.

I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, remembering what was important and why I was there.

“Have the children told you anything?” I asked.

“Only that they want to go live with their Aunt Chris in a house on top of a big building.”

“Did they talk about what happened to their mother?”

“I think she was murdered, Leonid.”

I didn’t want to say what I knew right then. She loved having those children in her house and there didn’t seem to be any reason to corroborate her fearful empathy.

Luckily the front door flew open, spilling in children along with their laughter and thumping grace.

“Hello,” Aura said, rising for her daughter and the small mob.

They laughed and greeted and talked about needing water and bathrooms and a DVD.

Theda and Aura started to work on these needs while the oldest sister stood to the side, arching her body in an odd, mature way.

“Fatima,” I said.

The girl widened her eyes and walked toward me. She held out her hand and I led her out onto the tiny balcony.

Pulling the glass door shut, I sat on one of the two pink cast-iron chairs out there. Fatima climbed into my lap as if we had known each other for her entire life.

“I like you, Fatima,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she agreed.

“And I’m going to be honest with you because that’s the only way we’ll be able to help each other.”

“All right.”

“You know your mother’s gone, right?”

“Yes.”

“And so we have two things that we have to do,” I said.

Fatima put her right hand against my chin and rubbed the stubbly hair there. Through my peripheral vision I could see Aura watching us from inside the apartment.

“What two things?” Fatima asked.

“I have to find your aunt so that I can get the man who made your mom go away and so that you can go live with Chrystal.”

“We want to be with our Aunt Chris,” Fatima said with emphasis.

“So we want the same thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me what you know about Aunt Chris,” I said.

“She’s beautiful and brave and never lies about anything she says she’ll do,” Fatima said in one breath. “And one time when Mama Shawna was sick she promised to take all of us to live with her if anything ever happened to Mama.”

“That’s very nice of her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea where Auntie Chris might go if she wanted to get away for a while?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Aunt Chris told me that I shouldn’t never tell anybody, not even Mama.”

“And have you ever told anyone?”

“Only Boaz, and he didn’t say anything.”

“Well, Fatima,” I said, “I know all about secrets. I have so many of them that I forget what they are sometimes. And I don’t want to make you tell something you promised not to, but I have to find Chrystal and you have to decide if finding her is worth telling her secret. I mean, do you think that she’d want you to tell me?”

Her serious face enchanted me: a child making her mind work in ways that felt impossible but must be done.

“I think she wants us to find her,” she said at last.

“Where can we do that?”

“Maybe at her getaway house in Saltmore, Altmore, something. It’s a place that she bought a long time ago when she sold her first painting. It’s a big secret, so you can’t tell anybody else. It’s a little white house with a yellow one on the right and a gray one on the left. And you have to take a train ride to get there.”

“Thank you, Fatima,” I said. “You can count on me, I will find Chrystal.”

A few blocks away from Aura’s I made a call on my cell phone.

“Hello?” a pleasant voice answered on the seventh ring.

“Tam? It’s LT.”

“Mr. McGill,” she said.

“That open offer for dinner good for tonight?”

“Absolutely. We’re eating at about six-thirty. Timothy will be in maybe an hour before that.”

“I’ll get there as close to six-thirty as I can.”

I got off the phone and shivered like a wet dog.