bond. She just don’t know. It’s worth ten times what she thinks.”
Using gangster logic I figured he meant a hundred times what she said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“That’s for me to know.”
“Well how’s this?” I added. “Elana told me that you were the one had the bond. She said that she left it with you, but that —”
“It’s all a lie,” the preacher said. There was the musical note of a sermon in his voice.
“There ain’t no bond?”
“Oh yeah. There’s a bond all right. Damn sure enough. But I don’t have it. I
“All you’re sayin’ is what isn’t and what’s lies and what didn’t happen. What me and my friend here need to know is what is.” I felt confident when Fearless was at my back, smart too.
Grove took me in for a moment or two.
“I remember you now,” he said. “At the bookstore. Vincent told me you worked there, but I didn’t remember the name.”
I nodded and waited.
“Leon,” he said, “sent Elana a letter askin’ her to come see him in prison. She was stayin’ with me at that time but still had her own place.”
“And you didn’t mind her gettin’ mail from an old boyfriend?”
“I saw my fortieth birthday two years ago, son. I know that women go to the bathroom and everything. I wasn’t her first man. I wasn’t her best man. Leon mentioned a thousand dollars in the letter, and so she took a day trip. Three days later we had the note.”
“Tell me about the note,” I said.
“What about it?”
“What country it come from? What’s the face value?”
“Ten thousand Swiss francs,” he said.
I was happy because at least one thing Elana said might be true.
“And she give it to you?” Fearless asked.
“It was new love. She saw in me what a woman wants to see in a man when they first start out.” Grove spoke from experience. “I could do anything at first. But then, when the bank told me on the phone that I had to have proof that I was David Tannenbaum, she saw a little tarnish here and there. I wanted to keep on the good side of a woman like that, so I go down to see the wife — Fanny.”
“You went to the Tannenbaum house?” I asked.
Fearless tensed up and then began his descent into a crouch.
“Yeah,” Grove said.
“When?”
“That was maybe four months ago,” he replied. “I went there to find out why her husband was in jail, the particulars.”
“Why she wanna talk to you?” Fearless asked.
“I said that I was the visiting chaplain at the prison. I said that her husband wanted me to tell her that he was okay.”
“Why she gonna believe that shit?” Fearless had no love lost for this messenger.
“Her husband forbade her to go up to the prison. That’s why Elana had to go up, to get a letter from the Jew to give to his wife. So all I did was say that he was doing okay and that he was safe and missing her.”
“And what she give you in return?” I asked.
That was the heart of our talk — what Fanny told Grove. He knew it and he knew I knew it. I was riding high on the powerful presence of Fearless and the fact that Grove was a little shy.
“It wasn’t nuthin’,” he said. “She didn’t know a thing.”
“That’s why you ran out on Elana? That’s why the Messenger packed up its drapes and ran?”
Grove took a deep breath, reaching for strength and conviction. “Elana got the bond. No matter what she told you, she got it. You find her, you find the bond. You do that, and you come to me. I can make ten times ten
