“I don’t want his money,” I said as a cold wave of shame washed through me.
“Sure you don’t,” he said. “But money makes life easier. Anyway, when the lawyers get through with it, and Uncle Sam, there’s not going to be much left, believe me. So take it. It’s what he wanted.”
Costa sucked air in sharply and arched his back. I squeezed his hand. He breathed out slowly, then relaxed.
“You better get some rest,” I said.
“I got plenty time to rest,” he said.
“Go to sleep, Theo Costa.”
“Niko?”
“Sir?”
“Enjoy yourself, boy. I can remember the day I stepped off the boat onto Ellis Island. I can still smell it, like I stepped off that boat this morning. It’s like I blinked my eyes and now I’m old. It goes, Niko. It goes too goddamn fast.”
He closed his eyes. Slowly, his breathing became more regular. Some time later, his hand relaxed in mine and he fell to sleep. Sitting there, I found myself hoping that he would die, just then. But he wasn’t ready. For whatever reason, he held on until the fall.
When the light outside the window turned from gray to black, I left the room and walked back down the stairs. I went to the dining room and found the liquor cabinet, near an ornate wall mirror covered with a blanket. Costa’s nurse sat at the dining room table, smoking a cigarette. I took a bottle of five-star Metaxa and couple of glasses and had a seat across from her. I poured her a brandy, then one for me. We drank together without a word, beneath the dim light of a chandelier laced with cobwebs and already shrouded in dust.
When I returned to my apartment, I saw that Lyla sant› ‹ had left a message on my machine. I phoned her and she asked if I wanted some company. I told her that it might not be a good idea.
“What, have you got something else happening?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”
“Maybe tomorrow night, huh?”
“Tomorrow’s looking kind of busy for me.”
“Nick, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I said, and shifted gears. “Hey, how’d it go with your editor yesterday?”
“It went all right,” she said, and then there was a fat chunk of silence.
“What happened?”
“It was about that day, after we had lunch. In Chinatown?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I had a few wines that day, if you remember, and then I went back to the office and finished off this story I was working on. Usually, I wait, go back to it, check it for style and all that. But I was on a deadline, so I turned it in right after I finished it.”
“And?”
“It was all fucked up, Nick. Jack gave me an earful about it, and he was right. It was really bad.”
“So what’s the mystery? You shouldn’t be drinkin’ when you’re writing copy, you know that.”
“That’s some advice,” Lyla said, “coming from a guy who stumbled in this morning after sunup and couldn’t even get out of his own pants.”
“That’s me, baby. It doesn’t have to be you.”
“Anyway, Jack hit me right between the eyes with it. Said I drink too much, that maybe I’ve got a problem. What do you think?”
“You said yourself, I’m not the one to ask. All’s I know, you wanted to be a journalist since you were a kid. I guess you’ve got to figure out what you want more. I mean, fun’s fun, but the days of wine and roses have to come to an end.”
“ ‘The Days of Wine and Roses’?” she said. “The Dream Syndicate.”
“That’s my line,” I said.
Lyla said, “Yeah, I beat you to it. I knew you were going to say it.”
“It only shows, maybe you been with me too long.”
“I don’t think so, Nick.”
“Lyla, I’ve really got to go.”
“You sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“Nothing wrong, Notht='0em' w” I said. “Bye.”
I had a couple of beers and went to bed. My sleep was troubled, and I woke before dawn with wide-open eyes. I dressed and drove down to the river, looking for a crazy black man in a brilliant blue coa t. Nothing. I watched the sun rise, then drove back to Shepherd Park.
After I made coffee, I phoned Jack LaDuke.
“LaDuke!”
“Nick!”
“Get over here, man. Early start today.”
“Half hour,” he said, and hung up the phone.
I found my Browning Hi-Power, wrapped in cloth in the bottom of my dresser. I cleaned and oiled it, loaded two magazines, and replaced the gun in the drawer. Just as I closed the drawer, LaDuke knocked on my front door.
SIXTEEN
' Nothin’!” LaDuke said as he hung up the phone in my apartment.
We had just called the first prospect from the classified section of D.C. This Week. LaDuke had done the talking, and he had put too much into it in my opinion, his idea of some swish actor.
“What’d he say?”
“Guy turned out to be legit. Some professor at Howard, doing a theatrical feature on street violence in D.C., trying to show the ‘other side,’ whatever that means. He was looking for young blacks males to play high school athletes sidetracked by drugs.”
“All right, don’t get discouraged; we’ve got another one here.”
LaDuke put his hand on the phone. “What’s the number?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m doin’ this one.”
I checked the number in the ad-this was the photographer, in search of healthy young black males-and pulled the phone over my way. My cat jumped up onto my lap as I punched the number into the grid.
“Yes?” said an oldish man with a faintly musical lilt in his voice.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m calling about an ad I saw in D.C. This Week, about some photography you were doing?”
“That’s a pretty old ad.”
“I was at a friend’s place; he had a back issue lying around. I was browsing through it-”
“And you don’t sound like a young black male.”
“I’m not. But I am healthy. And I’ve done some modeling, and a little acting. I was wonderingNothtght if you were exclusive with this black thing.”
The man didn’t answer. Another voice, stronger, asked him a question in the background, and he put his hand over the receiver. Then he came back on the line.
“Listen,” he said. “We’re not doing still photography here, not really. I mean, you got any idea of what I’m looking for?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I know what you’re doing.”
“How. How do you know?”
“Well, I just assumed from the ad-”
“An assumption won’t get you in. And like I said, that’s an old ad. You have a reference?”
