Telegraph Avenue

timbering and stucco with a concrete thatched roof, leftovers from the day, three or four cuisines ago, when it had been a fish-and-chips joint.

“If you want to pull over,” he said, happy to change the subject, “I can go get them.”

“Here they come.”

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

The boys came shuffling out of Merkata like prisoners chained at the ankle. Curtis & Poitier, brothers in woe. Something weighing on them, the burden of captivity, their secret escape plan. Julie clutching that portable eight-track to his chest with a weird, splay-fingered fierceness. Nat got out of the car, remarking the boys’ sheepish and hangdog expressions, wondering if maybe he needed to prepare his angry-dad routine. If he had it in him right now to do that; not to mention, given the events of last night, a moral leg to stand on.

“Julius Lawrence Jaffe, what did you do?”

He was shocked by the influx of his son into his arms. The bony shoulders, the soft lank hair against his cheek. Shocked by the tears that wetted the front of his shirt.

“Pop, I broke my tape player,” Julie said.

Disconsolate. Going slack against Nat like one of those little wooden puppets when you pushed the button in the base.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Nat said. For all the loneliness and anger, for all the stupidity and shame, for all the pain that losing Archy, the store, the vision that Brokeland had always—exactly like Archy said in his eulogy— represented to Nat, with a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of zeppelin rustling, and the possible destruction of the Bay Bridge or, who knew, the Sphinx, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on his conscience; right then, with his little boy restored sobbing to his embrace, it honestly did feel okay. This was something useful, maybe the sole useful thing, that he still knew how to do. “Let’s go home.”

Julius nodded, then looked up into Nat’s face. “Titus, too?”

“Sure, of course. Titus, you okay? Oh, Jesus, look at you, what happened?”

There was blood on Titus’s face, his shirt collar, and something else staining his shirt. His eyes were wide and shining, about to well over, and his expression was yearning as he watched Julius crumple into Nat’s arms. Standing there, blood on him, no one to hold or be held by. Looking at him, Nat felt ashamed. He opened his arms to make room in the embrace for Titus.

Titus shook his head once, disgusted, cool returned. Then he turned and ran away.

“Titus!” Julie called after him. “Pop, come on! Titus!”

He started to drag himself loose, but Nat held fast, and after a brief struggle, Julie gave up and turned to Gwen in the car, watching them.

“We have to go get him,” Julie said. “Gwen, let’s go.”

“I really don’t think he wants to be around us,” Gwen said. “And I need to go in and talk to these folks about something.”

There was no suff on the menu, but an understanding was reached, and after a brief wait and some blender activity, Gwen was able to allay this unlikely pain at last. She took the tall clear plastic tumbler filled with what Nat understood to be the thin beige milk of roasted sunflower seeds and tipped it to her lips. The joy and sweetness of it on her face, the orgasmic flutter of her eyelids, was stark, arousing.

“Oh, baby,” she said.

But then the weird-looking infusion seemed to go down badly.

“Excuse me,” she said. She put her long and beautiful fingers to her lips, opened her eyes wide, closed them again, and ran to the front door of the restaurant. Out on the sidewalk, she bent double and spasmed, making a sound that Nat would never afterward be able to unhear, a kind of robotic braying, over and over. Nat, an atheist, prayed for it to stop. It sounded like her stomach was tearing itself in two. When she returned, her cheeks and forehead were lustrous with sweat.

“Wow,” she said. She breathed, and swallowed, and breathed again. When she opened her eyes, Julie passed her a napkin, and she dabbed her lips with an improbable daintiness. “Thank you, baby.”

She stood still, scowling, as if listening for something, probing a tooth with her tongue, trying to remember whether she had left a burner lit on the stove at home. And then Nat smelled something that reminded him abruptly of Cochise Jones’s basement. That cheese-cellar whiff, faint as a whisper, of rot. A darker shade of black seeped across the front of Gwen’s stretchy black leggings.

“I’ll be right back,” she said with a chilling show of cheeriness. Her progress toward the bathroom was slow, her waddle exaggerated by the need to keep her legs apart. Behind her, splashes of water marked her passage. When she came out, she had pulled off her leggings and apparently disposed of them. The sight of her bare legs, emerging from the tails of one of Archy’s shirts, came as a shock to Nat. She looked vulnerable, and he understood that she was about to set out for a place, come what may, where she would be completely alone, so much more alone than an existential drama queen like Nat could possibly imagine.

“You need to get me to the hospital,” she said.

With Valletta gone—beyond the reach of X-rays, uplinks, and his unquenchable thirst for an audience—old Luther had lost his defiant aspect. He sat shifting in his chair as if it were greased or electrified, not meeting Archy’s eyes. Eyebrows arching, lips moving, telling Flowers to go fuck himself, saying nothing out loud. A whole great big argument going on there, inside his mind. A knife fight, a televised debate, a sumo match.

“Your father,” Flowers began. He paused, ordering his next words, putting them through their paces before he set them loose in the room. “Your dad has been trying to blackmail me,” he went on, keeping his tone light, amused by the idea. “Over something that happened a long time ago, that no one even cared about at the time, to somebody no one remembers. Been skulking around from rathole to rathole. Leaving scurrilous messages. Spreading scandal and lies.”

“Scandal, maybe,” Luther said. Shake of the head, going jowly, trying to match his old friend’s affectation of amusement with a show of moral severity every bit as unconvincing. “Not lies.”

“Naturally, I have a problem with this behavior,” Flowers went on, ignoring Luther, making his case directly to the appointed mediator, who was already five minutes past regretting having gotten mixed up in this shit in the first place, even though he knew that the choice not to get himself involved would, in the end, have proved just as big a pain in the ass. “But given the nature of the accusation, I haven’t felt—yet—that it would necessarily help clarify the situation to call in my good friends at OPD.”

“I hope you do,” Luther said. “I would love to tell them all about you.” He looked around, seeing if somebody might give him a high five, pound his fist. But it must have been looking right then like a pretty tough room.

“Let him say his piece,” Flowers suggested to Archy, speaking through the interpreter, “after I say mine.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Archy told Luther.

Luther shrugged, clapped one of his big paws to his mouth, Black Bolt holding back a fatal syllable. Scattered his limbs farther and looser in his chair.

“Even though I have been tied up with a number of other important matters,” Flower said, “I’ve also been trying to dig this man up out of whatever hole he was hiding in so I could bring him here, sit him down in front of me, and make him at least look me in the eye while he was trying to shake me down.”

“Here I am,” Luther said, knitting himself together, sticking out his jaw, as if being here were all his idea, a man of integrity walking the lonely path of truth and honor. When really he had been turned over like a worm on the blade of a trowel. “And I ain’t threatening you with nothing, Chan. What did I ever say, what note or message did I ever leave, besides, basically, the gist was, if you don’t want to help out your oldest friend, a man who been working so hard to clean himself up and get himself back on his feet, what’s that say about you? Which,” turning to Archy, “is more or less the message I been trying to convey to you, too.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Archy said. “Convey all you want, I’ll stamp it ‘Return to Sender’ every motherfucking time.” He turned to Flowers. “This is about that dude that got shot back in the seventies? Do I have that right? At the Panther bar, what was it, the Bit o’ Honey.”

“His name was Popcorn Hughes,” Flowers said. “He was a gangster, a cheap, ignorant, worthless East