“And he looks at me with these fucking Jesus eyes and says, ‘Mark, I’m sorry.’ Just that. And his face is all bloody and I’m thinking, Shit, what am I doing? What have I done? And I just—this is hard to talk about.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I just started crying, okay? And then we’re both crying, and we’re standing in the middle of the room hugging each other like brothers and crying like fucking babies. And I can’t stand to look at him and see what I’ve done to him, because his face is a mess. It probably looked worse later, with swelling and discoloration and all. But it was pretty bad then.
“He wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital. Insisted he’d be all right, and he’d take care of it himself. And he wanted to know how much it had cost me, what he’d done. How much money I was out, so he could start reimbursing me, so many dollars a month, whatever he could afford for as long as it took. I told him he didn’t owe me anything, it was all money I never should have had in the first place. And if I hadn’t lost it I’d have had no reason to get out of the business, and eventually I’d have gone away for it, which happened a couple of times to Uncle Selig, who was smarter and better at it than I’d ever be. So you could say he did me a favor, which is something I never thought of before then and probably never would have, if I hadn’t just spent ten minutes smashing my hand against this man’s face.
“Did I mention he wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital? A couple of hours later I went myself, walked over to Cabrini and had my hand looked at. It took that long before I realized how badly I’d hurt myself. I didn’t tell Jack, for fear that he’d decide he owed me another amends. I didn’t figure either of us could stand another amends.”
“You saw him again?”
“No. He called once, I think it was the next day or the day after. Just making sure everything was okay, and I was positive I didn’t want any of the money back. I never heard from him again, and then I found out he was dead. Shot to death, I think it was.”
“That’s right.”
He nodded to himself. “When I had the business uptown,” he said, “I owned a gun. It came to me as part of a deal, and I kept it because a person in that line of work needs protection, right? It disappeared in the burglary along with everything else. I never had a gun in my hands before or since. Never fired one in my life.”
I started to say something but he held up the unbandaged hand to stop me. “If,” he said. “If I’d still had that gun, or any gun, when Jack came in with his amends, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Pick it up, point it, pull the trigger. I guess that’s what somebody else did.”
“It was at his apartment.”
“Jack’s apartment?”
“Someone came to his place,” I said, “and brought a gun along. He was shot twice at close range, once in the forehead and once in the mouth.”
“I didn’t know that. It sounds cold.”
“And purposeful,” I said. “ ‘You talk too much.’ ”
“Maybe.” He looked at me with Bambi’s big soft eyes. “He was just trying to make things right with everybody, and it doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then. What’s done is done, you know? Leave the past alone. But the point is he was trying to accomplish something, and all it did was get him killed.”
XIV
THERE WAS A message in my box at the Northwestern, a call logged an hour earlier from Greg Stillman. I called him from my room, and he said he thought I might have been trying to reach him. His answering machine had been able to tell him that there had been several calls from someone who hadn’t left a message.
“So who else could it be?”
“You know,” he said, “I think there’s a country song along those lines. ‘If nobody answers, it’s me.’ It wasn’t you, though, was it?”
“I did hang up on an answering machine,” I said. “A couple of times. But it wasn’t your machine.” And I filled him in on my meeting with Mark Sattenstein.
“So you found out who gave Jack the beating. But he didn’t shoot him.”
“No.”
“You don’t think he could be lying about it?”
“Not a chance.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “I’d more or less assumed that one person was responsible for both the beating and the shooting. ‘Oh, that’s not enough to get rid of you? All right, in that case
“By the time Sattenstein finished hitting him, there was no anger left.”
“And his take now is that our Jack rescued him from a life of crime. It’s a shame he didn’t show up at the service. He could have told that story and had everybody in tears.”
“He referred to him once as High-Low Jack,” I said. “I didn’t want to interrupt him at the time, and then I forgot. I was halfway out the door before I asked him about it.”
“And?”
“And he didn’t even remember that he’d used the sobriquet, but—”
“He said
“No, of course not. Nickname, he must have said. He didn’t recall using it today, but he could have, because he’d been familiar with it in the days when the two of them did business together. But he had no idea how Jack came by the name, or what it meant.”
