When the Thrill Is Gone

36

When the train was pulling into Baltimore’s Penn Station I reflected on the fact that I’d come there because of an uncorroborated hunch. Fatima just remembered the sound of the name of a place where her aunt had a secret hideaway. The child could have been confused, or repeating the name of some hamlet in Maine or South Carolina.

I left New York because I needed some time off and didn’t know how to take it in a straightforward fashion. Between Hush’s transformation and Aura’s bright light of perception, between the deaths of three young women and the children I took, I was exhausted and, worse, a little uncertain.

Looking up, I saw Klaus returning from the head for the fourth time.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said in his powerful, if elderly voice.

“Yes, Mr. Klaus.”

“You never said whether you were a Communist or not.”

“I was trained not as a party member but as a revolutionary,” I said truthfully. The burly man in the back of the train stood up, though I was sure he couldn’t have heard my words. “Somewhere on that journey I lost my way... or maybe found it. Anyway, the answer to your question depends more on you than it does on me.”

My response seemed to amuse the mass murderer.

“May I have your card?” he said.

I gave it to him, more to bedevil the bodyguard than for any other reason. The hapless protector watched from six strides away as I got close enough to cause all kinds of permanent damage.

“Leonid?” Klaus said upon reading the card.

“Just part of my training,” I told him.

The Baltimore train Station’s waiting room was the size of a hangar for a dirigible. The Acela arrived twelve minutes early and so I decided, for no clear reason, to wait in the huge space with its long wooden benches, high ceilings, and murky windows that allowed in copious, if filtered, light.

Taking out my PDA, I found that Mardi had done her work for the week.

Using Bug’s templates she found that eight years earlier Chrystal Chambers had bought a small home, comprising only nine hundred square feet of living space, on a street named Freeling Drive. The deal was brokered by Starkman Realty and the mortgage was held by a small bank in New York called Herkimer-People’s Trust, a name that would have caused my father to give me a lecture on the incestuous and corrosive nature of capitalism.

“Excuse me, sir?”

She was young, poorly dressed in brown cotton pants and a baby-blue short-sleeved blouse. Her hair was straightened in places and not in others — as if maybe in the middle of a hairdressing session she told the stylist that she couldn’t afford the appointment. Mahogany brown, twenty at the most, her shoes were pink and plastic. Her once-red nails were cut close.

“Yes?” I said.

Twenty feet away a black man, maybe forty, was watching us closely. This reminded me of Rainier Klaus and his ineffective bodyguard.

“I need some money to buy a, um, a ticket,” she said.

“That guy in the black pants and gray shirt put you up to this?” I asked.

“Um...”

“That’s all right, sugar,” I said. “I’ll do what you want, just tell me if that dude is running you.”

“Yeah. He my boyfriend.”

“Drugs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“For the both’a you?”

“Just him. Just sometimes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Seema.”

A security guard was watching the man watching us.

“So I’ll tell you what, Seema. I’ll give you some money if you want it. But I’ll also take you out of here and drop you anyplace else you want.”

Her eyes pondered over the broad field of possibility.

“Brody won’t let me go.”

“Brody can’t stop you, baby. ’Cause you know I am both a rock and a hard place.”

She must have recognized the paraphrasing from some old-time relative.

“I bettah not cause no trouble, mistah.” She turned as if to leave me.

“Hold up, girl,” I said. “I told you I’d give you money. How much you and Brody need?”

“Fi’ty.”

I reached into a back pocket and took out my thirty-year-old red-brown wallet. I teased out a fifty-dollar bill and a business card. These I handed to Seema.

“Put the card away,” I said. “If you feel sometime later that you need to get out, just call me. I will be there and I will do my best to help.”

Up until that moment there was a kind of unfocused intensity to the young woman. But something about the weight of all the promises, along with the very real money and card, caused her to look directly at me.

“Thank you. Thank you very much, mistah.”

She put the card in one pocket and the cash in another and then turned away. As I watched her approach Brody I began to understand that my profession had somehow changed into a calling.

In the parking lot there was a bright-yellow Prius with the keys in a magnetized little box attached to the inner side of the back bumper. This was a benefit provided by a nationwide network of car rental services that delivered vehicles of all kinds to clients like me. Zephyra always had a car waiting for me, no matter where I needed it.

Using the GPS System in my phone I entered the address and drove out from the train station’s parking lot.

The route took me through side streets and shabby avenues where business had almost stopped, filled with pedestrians looking for a way to hang on.

Baltimore has a large black population, souls who have been there for generations, and who have not yet received the notice of a postracial America.

I passed through neighborhoods that were once fancy and now slum, and areas that had started out working class and stayed that way. The route I was traveling took me past few, if any, chain stores; no fancy coffee houses or 99 Billion Served, no grand supermarket parking lots or warehouses that sold everything the oppressed Chinese population could produce.

There were places like Juma’s Grocery Market and Cosmo’s Boiled Crab and Ribs.

Freeling was a quiet street of little matchbox houses. Most looked kept-up. My GPS told me that I had arrived at my destination so I pulled up to the curb between a lime-green pickup truck and a purple 1969 Cadillac.

The house I was aimed at was number 47. The whitewashed wooden structure was boxy, with a lawn fourteen feet wide and two feet deep. To the right there was a yellow house, to the left a gray. The front door had no porch or pathway, not even a step up.

I stopped there for a moment, William Williams’ satchel in hand, gathering my wits. My clients were a bunch of kids whose dead mother had hired me under the pretext of being the owner of this small home.

If running a fool’s errand were the key, then I had access to the kingdom.

“Excuse me,” came a man’s voice that was totally devoid of deference.

There were four of them, three men and a woman, all black, all very serious, if not angry. One of the men was carrying a small gardening spade in his left hand. I wondered if he had just stood up from landscaping or if he’d picked up that tool specifically for my detriment. I also wondered if he was left-handed.

“Yes?” I said to the mob.

“What you doin’ here?” a fortyish dark-skinned man in a loose-fitting yellow T-shirt and black trousers asked. Five eight, short by most standards.

I held up the briefcase and said, “My business.”

“What you want wit’ Miss Murphy?” the woman asked. She was taller and heavier than the first speaker. Her color was that of maple syrup in a glass jar, but in shadow.

My response was to set my satchel down on the sidewalk.

“What?” a very tall, gray-brown man said. He wore a buttoned-up, short-sleeved red shirt.

“Whatever you want,” I replied.

Threats always make me a little crazy. It’s my childhood code of survival kicking my ass — and everyone else’s in close proximity.

“Hey, man,” said a fellow who was both tall and heavy.

My smile was irrepressible.

“Excuse me.” The words this time were friendly and feminine.

A glance to my right revealed Shawna’s face — if that visage had been scrubbed of makeup and resentment in the guise of sneering sexuality. She was wearing a faded baby-blue T-shirt and loose blue exercise shorts.

“You know this man, Miss Murphy?” the woman member of the vigilantes asked.

“He’s not Melvin,” Chrystal Chambers-Tyler said.

“Ms. Murphy?” I said. “My name is Clayton Adams, from Child Services in New York. I’ve come about your sister’s — Shawna’s — children.”

This pronouncement left her no choice. She took in a breath that was half a gasp and then said, “Come in... come in, Mr. Adams.”