When the Thrill Is Gone

34

I was on Ninth Street near Third Avenue. The night was electric but empty. There wasn’t much traffic of foot or tire, and though I was standing still, my mind was breaking all the speed limits.

Hush was rarely wrong about contract killers. He knew his profession and I had the good sense to avoid a fight that I was bound to lose.

Twill’s business had to be shut down but it wasn’t just that. I had to somehow stop my favorite son from drifting into a life of corruption. There was no way that he could comprehend, in his youthful confidence, how the weight of his actions would pile on him, on his soul.

I was making progress but it was like having taken three strides into a five-hundred-yard-wide minefield. I could see the other side. I could imagine walking on ground that wouldn’t blow up under my feet. But first I had to take that next step, and then the one after that.

“Excuse me, sir,” a man’s voice said in a tone of false deference.

A car door slammed shut.

There were footsteps of more than one man.

I smiled at the respite this minor threat offered.

“Yes, officer?” I said before turning around to meet the cops.

They were, of course, both taller than I. They were white, but that hardly mattered. Young men, they made the mistake of thinking that I was no threat because of my height and weight and obvious age.

“What’s going on?” the one on my left asked.

“I’m standing here on an empty street taking stock of my life such as it is.”

“You been drinking?” the other inquired. This one had a beauty mark on the left side of his face, half an inch from the nostril. Being a man, he probably called it a blemish.

“All my life,” I said. “But not in the last twelve hours.”

“Show us some ID,” Beauty asked.

“Why?”

“Come again?”

“I’m a middle-aged man, wearing a suit, standing alone on a public sidewalk with nothing in my hands. What about that is suspicious?”

The cops moved toward me — a movable barrier against my anger.

“Show us some ID,” the guy without a mole asked.

I closed my eyes, considering first the immediate response of civil disobedience. Then I gathered my intelligence, opened my eyes, and stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of my dark-blue jacket.

Coming out with two laminated cards, I handed these to Beauty.

He took them and read the contents. It was my PI’s ID and driver’s license. Both of them had my real name, so the encounter was bound to continue.

“Wait here,” Beauty said to his partner and me.

He went to the squad car to call in. The police were always supposed to call in when they came across my name. I was infamous.

“Would you submit to a search of your person?” the cop left with me asked.

“By Beyoncé, if she asked nicely,” I replied.

The cop’s eyes tightened and my phone made a sound that I recognized.

“You can answer that,” my guard told me.

“And you know what you can do,” I told him.

Revolution is fought on every street corner of every city, town, and hamlet in the world, my poor besotted father used to rant. The only true power that the authorities have is the people’s belief in that power.

Beauty returned and said to his partner, “Let’s go.”

“What?” the cop said and I thought.

“They said to leave him be.”

“But he resisted.”

“The captain got on the line,” Beauty explained to the both of us. “He said to let him go.”

The cops gave me the look, the gaze that’s supposed to stay with you long after they’re gone. I grinned and waved at them as they folded their long bodies back into the black-and-white and then drove off to find some other suspicious loiterer.

Once they were gone I wondered about a police captain somewhere telling his minions to lay off Leonid Trotter McGill. I was Public Enemy Number 26 or so in the city of New York. I’ve been rousted for vagrancy, littering, jaywalking, and public drunkenness. They could have put me in stir for seventy-two hours on a resisting-arrest beef.

I might have worried if my phone hadn’t sounded again.

“Hey, Aura,” I said into the cell.

“We were interrupted in our talk earlier,” she said.

“Luckily for me, I’m sure.”

“Where are you?”

“A twelve-minute walk from you.”

“Meet me at Trey’s in half an hour.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Trey’s is a small bar with a really good pianist and sometimes a singer, Yolanda Craze, who could bring tears to the eyes of the dead.

That night Yolanda had off and so the music was just deeply moving, somewhere just outside of the heart of desolation.

Aura came in fifteen minutes late. She always did that on a date. I was used to it. She wore a loose-fitting, antique-white dress that somehow showed off her fine figure anyway.

I was sitting at a small round table away from the white baby grand with a bottle of Beaujolais breathing for her.

She took her seat without stopping to kiss me and I didn’t complain.

I held out a hand, palm up, and she touched it with four fingers.

“What were you doing in the neighborhood?” she asked.

“Dinner with Hush, planning an international bank heist, and then being stopped by the cops for standing still on a street corner.”

“They’ll kill you one day, Leonid.”

“That and breathing,” I said, “the only things that all human beings hold in common.”

She smiled and looked down at my hand on the table.

This was the beginning of her speech, I knew. So I kept quiet, if pensive.

“When you,” she said and then paused. “When you were in the hospital after being stabbed and beaten, I was there looking at you unconscious and burning with fever. At the time all I thought about was you. I used all my will to imagine you healthy and smiling again. But later, after you were out of danger, I began to realize that this was your life and even if we were together you would be in that bed again and again until finally one day you wouldn’t recover.”

She looked up into my eyes, maybe hoping for me to deny her claim. But I didn’t have anything to say.

“Theda loves you, and I do, too, Leonid. I would die for you. I would do anything... but even if you left Katrina, how could I bring you completely into my life, knowing that you will be killed violently, senselessly?”

The notes of the piano made no musical sense at that moment. They were dissonant sounds coming from nowhere and flittering off into space like children jumping from a fast-moving merry-go-round.

I had no answer to her question, so I sat back and nodded.

“Will you still love me?” she asked.

“Let me walk you home,” I answered.