unconscious there next to me.
Like a sprinter at the end of a race, I needed many deep gulps of air before I could breathe normally. My chest was hurting and I wanted more than anything to scream. I was shiveri Nep ng and cold, sweating too.
I never dreamt about my victims, but their memory is the mortar and stone of that burning building.
The alarm clock on my side of the bed said 5:06.
I couldn’t bear the thought of another meal with my half-family and pretend wife.
I knew full well that Katrina was being so nice to me only because she had faced the real possibility of being set adrift in life at middle age. If she met a new Andre Zool tomorrow she’d be gone by the end of the week.
I rolled out of bed and went to my den, where I always kept a change of clothes.
Down on the street I lit one of Ambrose Thurman’s Camels and walked toward Broadway. At a kiosk on the corner I bought the
I COULDN’T READ in the subway because the closeness in there brought back the desperation of my dream. I imagined fire rolling through the subway car and people screaming, battering the windows with their hands and heads.
THERE’S A DINER DOWN the block from the Tesla Building. I read my paper there while eating a scrambled-egg sandwich with American cheese, bacon, yellow mustard, and raw onions. I scoured the metro section of the paper, looking for news about people I knew in my previous life. There were killings and robberies, a kidnapping, and three major arrests, but none of it had to do with me.
My heart was still thrumming from the nightmare and so I did the crossword puzzle. I had just penciled the five-letter name for “Black crime writer” when I noticed that it was three minutes after seven.
I made my way down to the Tesla and took an elevator to the eighty-first floor. That’s where Aura Ullman’s office was. She was always at work by seven.
The ornate halls that I had loved the day before now made me nervous, the corridors so reminiscent of the dream. But seeing her door and the light through the frosted glass pane eased my tension a bit.
“Who is it?” she called in answer to my knock.
“Leonid.”
“Come in.”
A click sounded from the electric release of the lock. I pushed the door and walked in.
It was one big room. S on in There was probably a window somewhere but there was so much stuff stacked along the walls that it was anybody’s guess where it might have been. There were cleaning supplies and filing cabinets, three safes and five pegboards, with dozens of keys hanging from each one. Fire extinguishers, cartons of toilet paper, a dozen new mops, and cans of paint were stacked in such a way as to form an aisle leading to Aura’s big black-metal desk.
The ceiling was lined with half a dozen rows of fluorescent lights, all of them glaring brightly.
“How can you bear this kinda light?” I asked when I’d gotten to her desk.
“I take life as it comes,” she answered and I thought about Twill and his similar philosophy.
I sat in a dark green metal folding chair in front of her. She looked up from the big ledger she’d been writing in.
“You had that dream again, didn’t you?” she said.
She looked into my eyes and I felt sick. Gazing across the expanse of the cluttered desk at a woman so aware of my mood seemed to be the symbol of my impossible life.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
Many a night while sleeping with Aura I had started awake from that same dream. Every time she’d ask me what it was about but I couldn’t answer. It felt like naming the dream would somehow make it real.
“I don’t know, Aura. I don’t know.”
She got up and went to her old, old Mr. Coffee machine and poured the strong brew into a Styrofoam cup. She brought this to me and sat on top of the desk, looking down on my head.
For three or four long minutes we sat there. I appreciated the respite, the moments when I could be myself in silence, but with company.
“Why do you stay with her?” Aura asked at last.
“I don’t—” I said and stopped.
I looked up to see her stormy eyes. She was smiling because she knew that I had stopped myself from lying.
“It’s my sentence,” I said. “It’s what I owe.”
“You don’t love her.”
“That’s what makes it a punishment.”
“She doesn’t care about you.”
“But I’m the evil she’s familiar with,” I said. “I’m the guy on the ground floor, so she knows I can’t let her down.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Aura said. “You’re a good man, and even if you weren’t, everyone should have some happiness in their lives.”
I stood up and handed her an envelope with thirty-seven hundred dollars in it: two months’ rent plus a hundred-dollar late fee.
Taking the money from me, she said, “I want you back.”
“Thanks for the coffee, Aura. It means a lot to me.”
E€„
10
I was behind my desk when the buzzer to the front door sounded. The image on the monitor in my desk drawer was confirmation of the rightness of my decision to stay out of Aura’s life.
Tony “The Suit” Towers was slouching there, loitering in the hall the same way he hung out on the stoops of Hell’s Kitchen when that area of Manhattan lived up to its name.
I made my way to the front door and opened up for the middle-management hood.
He was a tall white man of indeterminate middle age. Slim and green-eyed, Tony professed to own two hundred and forty-eight suits, and a different pair of shoes for each one. These outfits weren’t very fine or expensive, but few people ever saw him wear the same ensemble twice.
That morning he had on sky-blue rags with a black shirt and yellow tie. His shoes were bone-colored, his short-brimmed hat navy. When he saw me he dropped the cigarette he was smoking and crushed it underfoot.
His moderately straight teeth were tar stained and uninviting.
“Hello, LT,” he said. There was a torn quality to the habitual criminal’s voice, an unpleasant gruffness.
“Tone.”
It bothered me most that Towers came alone to my door. He usually traveled with two leg breakers named Lucas and Pittman. If they had come along I would have known that it was business as usual: a collection or maybe a simple interrogation. When Tony moved alone he was a shark on the hunt and that meant there was already blood in the water.
We shook hands and smiled politely.
I considered asking him his business right there in the hall, telling him without uttering the words that he was no longer welcome in my world. But pushing Tony Towers away would be like sweeping a rattlesnake under the bed before retiring. He wasn’t in the top echelon of the New York underworld, but since I had vacated my position as a PI for the various mobs and crews I had no natural defenses against men like him.
So I backed away, allowing him entree. Once he was in I trundled back toward my office. Tony followed close behind. I barely cringed. After all, a bullet in the back of the head was probably t Vackhe best way to leave this world.
Tony didn’t shoot me, though. He followed me into my office and took a seat in the blue client’s chair, without an invitation.
As I made it around to my desk chair Tony was already conducting business.
“I got a problem, LT. It’s the kinda thing you’re good at, too.”
Sitting down was a good thing. It left me with nothing to do but pay close attention to the criminal sitting there before me.
Tony had a long face, and now that he’d doffed his hat you could see the double spikes of his receding hairline. He placed a cigarette between his lips, lit a match, and then asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Burn away,” I replied.
My unwelcome guest didn’t like the answer but he lit his menthol and inhaled deeply.
“So I got this problem—”
“I’m not in the life anymore, Tony,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t walk that side of the street.”
“That’s what they say. Benny told me that you’re a straight arrow now. You know what I told Benny?”
I sighed.
“I told Benny,” The Suit continued, “that LT knows that he’s a little fish in a big ocean. I told him that the only little fishes that survive are the ones eat the parasites off from where the big ones can’t reach.”
Tony smiled, showing off his soiled teeth.
“I’m out, man,” I said.
The smile dried up, which was both a relief and a worry.
“Don’t get all upset,” he said. “All I want from you is some legitimate private-detective work, not no criminal activity.”
Tony had lived so long because he was crafty if not smart. What he needed was
