When the Thrill Is Gone

40

As we were pulling into the Newark train station I turned to gaze at her profile.

The train was pulling out again before she asked, “What?”

“You say that you and Cyril don’t have a very powerful erotic connection.”

I didn’t need to say anymore. She understood the implications.

“I know a man,” she said. “His name is Lod, he lives in Astoria. We... we get together sometimes.”

“Cyril know about him?”

“Maybe not his name, but he knows.”

“How about a big guy, dressed all in brown, maybe pretends that he’s Cyril sometimes.”

“Him and me? I don’t think so.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s Cyril’s bastard stepbrother — Ira Lamont.”

There was a full stop at the end of her answers. I needed more information, but her tone told me to slow it down. I didn’t mind. I was just another lemming — standing on line.

“Aunt Chris!” a child yelled when we came into the door.

Then all the children mobbed the woman their mother had pretended to be. They hugged and kissed and finally got down on the floor, the whole gang of them.

The four-year-old, Dorian, moved away after a while. The copper-colored boy picked up a stuffed tiger and started a conversation with it.

“Dorian,” Chrystal said playfully.

“Yes?” he said in the same tone and timbre.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Yes, I do,” he said, still looking at his doll.

“Then come here and give me some sugar.”

The boy laughed and ran back into the brood.

After a good while of playing and reconnecting, Theda took the kids to her room for the castle game that everyone liked to play. Aura, Chrystal, and I sat at an oval table that looked down on Gramercy Park, there to sip wine and discuss murder.

“So you don’t know what your sister was talking about when she came to my office?” I asked Chrystal.

“No,” she said, “not at all. I mean, I did feel pushed out by Cyril, and I was worried about his history with wives ending up dead, but he didn’t want to kill me. And even if he did I wouldn’t go to Shawnie about that. She could hardly hold her own life together.”

“But you gave her the money she paid me with.”

“I gave her fifty thousand dollars. Some of it was for her and some to give to Tally if he needed it. She said that she wanted to get out of that commune and get a job in a beauty shop.”

“And you just gave her that much money?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“So? My husband owns a farm in Brazil that would take you three weeks to hike across. My room in his house is worth a million dollars on the open market. And, anyway, I don’t really care about money.”

Aura was silent, listening to a conversation both spoken and unspoken.

“Fatima told me that they buried her mother in a garden near where they lived,” Chrystal said.

“I called the police. If they found her it should have been in the papers.”

“It was,” Aura said. “This morning. The police found her yesterday.”

Without being asked, Aura went into the kitchen and came back with the Post. The story was pushed to page eight because of a drug overdose in Hollywood, a has-been star who made the headlines one last time.

We were silent while Chrystal read her sister’s pop obituary.

The children’s laughter wafted in from down a hallway and through a door.

Chrystal put the paper down and looked at me.

“I have no idea what’s going on here,” she said. “But I want you to find out who did this.”

“She hired me to protect you,” I said.

“She can stay here, Leonid,” Aura said. “No one knows, and the children need her.”

“Thank you,” Chrystal said and the deal was sealed.

“I’m not the police,” I said to anyone who wanted to listen. “I don’t arrest people, or solve crimes for that matter. I will look into this deeply enough to make sure you and Shawna’s kids are safe. But when I get anywhere near the truth I’ll turn it over to the cops. Arresting people and bringing them to trial is what you pay your taxes for.”

“Okay. I just need to know.”

That was the end of our little tête-à-tête-à-tête. It was time for me to get out there and make the streets safe for artists and orphans. But sitting at that table, between those two women (either one of whom I loved more than my wife of twenty-odd years), I was frozen.

That’s when Chrystal reached across the table and touched my left wrist.

“Thank you.”

Aura took in this intimacy. I noticed her and she saw this regard in my eyes. It was the way Escher probably saw the world: an endless reflection of awareness advancing and receding.

“Aura,” I said.

“Yes, Leonid?”

“I might need a space to work this thing.”

“Office or apartment?”

“An apartment would do fine.”

Without a word she stood up and went to her bedroom door.

When she was gone, Chrystal said, “Don’t worry. I won’t cause a problem.”

Yet another point of view in the endless knot of desire.

Aura came back with two key chains that each held three keys.

“The place is on East Thirty-first, over near Madison,” she said. “Address and apartment numbers are on the tags.”

“Keep this and leave it downstairs at the Tesla,” I said, handing back one of the key chains. “Tell them that someone coming from me will pick them up. And can you make sure that there’s a live telephone jack?”

“Yes.”

“And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Get somebody to go to Mardi and ask her for the special black phone. Get them to connect it at the apartment.”

She nodded, not quite looking me in the eye.

There was nothing else to say, and so I left the apartment, made my way down the stairs to the front door, and walked outside — where I could start breathing again.