weren’t in the life anymore, but then I figured you could always say no.”
“Was my name the only one you gave him?”
“You’re one of a kind, LT.”
I COULDN’T SEE a flaw, only smell one. And the smell was all physical.
“Hello?” Tim Moore said through the phone.
“How many numbers in the lock on your briefcase?”
“Three.”
“There’s a variety store a block or so north of Bleecker on the east side of Hudson,” I said. “It’s called Iko’s. Set the lock to six-six-seven and leave it there for a Joan Ligget.”
“Should I put your money in it, too?”
“Yeah. Do that,” I said. “Now give me what you got.”
Fifteen minutes later I was entering Zephyra Ximenez’s number.
“Yes, Mr. McGill?”
“Have somebody pick up a briefcase at Iko’s and leave it with the guys at the front desk of my office building, ASAP.”
SHELLY AND DIMITRI were sitting down to dinner with their mother when I came in. I had called again, and so Katrina made the service coincide with my ETA. I was carrying the briefcase, less my five- thousand-dollar fee.
“Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said just a bit too loudly.
Dimitri grunted and I nodded to him.
Katrina is the best cook I’ve ever met—bar none. She can make anything. That night she’d prepared red beans and rice with a spicy tomato sauce and filled with andouille and chorizo sausage. In little dishes arranged in the middle of the dining table she had set out grated white cheese, chopped Bermuda onions, green olives, and diced jalapenos—seeds and all.
I pulled up my chair at the head of the table, setting the briefcase beside me. I like a good meal. Katrina beamed from the opposite end and for a brief span I forgot our differences and disconnections.
“Smells great, honey,” I said. “How you doin’, D?”
“Okay, I guess,” Dimitri mumbled.
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“You need anything there?”
He shook his head. That meant that he wasn’t going to talk anymore.
But I didn’t care. I was thinking about the young woman of Scandinavian descent whom I had loved passionately for nine months, with sporadic recurrences for a year or two after.
What had Tim compared it to? A forty-eight-hour bug. Our love was more like a couple of years of consumption on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It took us that long to recover. Though the symptoms were gone, I was often reminded of them at dinner.
“I’m going to take a special course in African- American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”
She went on to regale me about the political commitment and supposed naivete of Paul Robeson. It seemed that everything Shelly did was intended to make me happy. Sometimes I wondered if it might be a mercy to tell her that I wasn’t her real father.
She was still talking when Twill entered the dining room. AccomU€ng room.panying him was a skinny, teenaged, white waif-child with ash-blond hair and the saddest pale eyes. I had only seen pictures of her as a prepubescent girl but I would have recognized Mardi Bitterman if she were retirement age.
“Mom, Pop,” Twill said brightly. “Sis, Bulldog,” he said to his siblings. “This is Mardi, a friend of mine from school.”
“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible.
“Late for dinner,” Katrina chided. “Now sit, both of you.”
I could tell by her expression that Katrina wasn’t happy with an unannounced guest. But she knew from past experience that if she complained Twill would leave—which would turn my mood sour.
Twill sat Mardi next to Shelly, knowing that his sister would immediately take the child under her wing. My daughter engaged the wounded wraith of a girl. After a few minutes they were gabbing, newfound friends. Shelly talking loudly with broad facial gestures, and Mardi whispering, sometimes even partially covering her mouth.
Katrina had lost her Mona Lisa smile with a stranger at her table. I doubt if Dimitri’s mood would have changed if we were in the middle of a nuclear war. The girls seemed to be getting along, and Twill, as usual, was ebullient and lively.
“So what’s happenin’, Pop?”
“Lookin’ for a guy in Brooklyn, and a client came in today to get me to talk to somebody givin’ him grief.” I didn’t mind talking about work in broad swaths. This made my job seem mundane and served to lessen any interest my family might have shown.
“You readin’ anything good?” he asked me.
Twill never read a book unless he absolutely had to.
“Picked up this little book on the history of Western philosophy,” I said.
“Like who?” my son asked.
“What is it, son?”
“What do you mean?” Even at his most disingenuous, Twill was charming.
“What do you want?”
His grin was perfect.
“Well, you know, Pop,” he said and paused. “You know . . . Mardi here is havin’ a problem at home and I told her she could stay here a night or two.”
“Absolutely not,” Katrina commanded from her end.
Twill didn’t look at her. He was no longer smiling, either.
Even if I hadn’t known about thU€known abe girl and her father I would have taken the boy’s side.
“You have to learn, Twilliam,” my wife was saying, “that you cannot just waltz in here and make—”
“Kat,” I said.
My wife hates the feline contraction of her name.
“I am not an animal,” she would tell anyone who dared use that appellation.
I told her I would never use the term unless I needed her to pay close attention to what I had to say.
She stopped mid-sentence and glared at me.
“Shall we go to the kitchen?” I suggested.
“WHY DID YOU embarrass me in front of our children?” she asked when we’d reached her bastion.
It was the first time she’d shown anger since coming back home.
“Because I have it on good authority that this girl’s father has been raping her since she was a small child.”
Katrina’s lower jaw fell open. She had been ready to unleash one of her fiery tantrums but my words doused that flame.
“What?”
“You can’t let on to her or Twill that you know anything about it. You know our son. You know what he’s capable of. I need to defuse the situation before it gets out hand. Do you hear me?”
She nodded.
“The girl can stay with you or Shelly. Shell seems to like her, so maybe that would be good. I’ll bunk with Twill. I’ll tell him that you asked me to so that he doesn’t get with the girl, but really I just want to keep my eye on him until I know why he needs her to stay here.”
“Her father?”
I nodded.
“That’s terrible. We should call the police.”
“We will,” I said. “But not until I’m sure that the cops’ll do something.”
I turned toward the door, expecting Katrina to come along with me, but instead she placed a feathery touch upon my wrist. I stopped but could not bring myself to turn and face her. Just as with my contraction of her name, Katrina could do small things that spoke volumes down the corridors of our history.
“Leonid.”
“Yeah?” I said to the door in front of me.
“Look at me.”
I faced her but could not look directly in her eyes.
“You know that I’m trying my best,” she said. “I’m here and I want to be a good wife to you.”
I took in a deep breath and counted one in my mind.
“The past is over,” she said. “I’m here with you now.”
I exhaled and counted.
“Zool went bust,” I said. “I asked a pal of mine to see what happened to him. They say he flew to Argentina an hour before the feds issued a warrant.”
She took it well: no tears or tremors.
“I learned from that, Leonid. I missed my children. I missed my life with you.”
“I’m here, am I not?”
“With one foot out the door and the other one raised to go.”
“What do you want from me, Katrina?”
“I want you to try. I want a life together and to be forgiven for whatever I’ve done wrong.”
I had counted up to ten and started over.
“I don’t know how to do that.” The words came to voice from the empty chamber of my mind.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what happened to you two years ago that made you so much more distant.”
The shock of her knowledge of me was muted by the walking meditation. Maybe even the discipline helped me to see what was right there in front of me. I could see that no matter what Katrina would do, given a way out, that she had made up her mind to try and make the marriage work while she was there. She wasn’t pretending or lying. My wife wanted, maybe for the first time ever, to make a bridge between her heart and my life. All I had to do was open the way.
I got as far as opening my mouth. An unintelligible sound came out.
“What?” she asked.
That single-syllable question hit my ear like the soft concussion of a far-off explosion. It was little more than a pop, but the seasoned soldier knew that it might very well signify injury or
