When the Thrill Is Gone (10 page)

I STOOD OUT in front of the hole-in-the-wall limo service for a few minutes, thinking about the young man and his life, such as it was. America was tethered to its lineage by a frayed rope made up of millions of young men and women like him. It wasn’t any wonder that so many of these youth had no notion of their history and no hope for a future except what they were told by the TV.

This notion felt very important at that time. I must have seemed a little cracked standing under the hot sun in a dark suit, sweating and staring at the empty street.

Finally I decided to walk to my next meeting. The task, I felt, would be some kind of penance for my abandonment of so many youngsters like Tally.

IT WAS A NICE DAY and so there were hundreds of people ambling and power-walking, running and biking across the Brooklyn Bridge. They spoke French and Mandarin, Spanish and Russian, with English accents and southern drawls. Bicycles whizzed by my right side as lovers holding hands unconsciously nudged me into the bike lane. Joggers weaved in between the tourists and lovers, and every sixth or seventh stroller was chatting on a cell phone. The sky bloomed with clouds over the dark, sinewy East River, and my dome was beaded with sweat.

The bridge always made me happy. Tally and Two Dog and Big Boy would live or die, but the bridge would still be standing, connecting the world with a history that cannot fade.

PRISTINE ENTERPRISES Retirement Community was on Rector Place, in the center of Battery Park City. It was a pink-and-clearglass building that took up half a city block. The front desk was round with a raised floor that allowed the copper-skinned receptionist (whose nameplate read D. DIAZ) to sit in a swivel chair instead of standing on her feet, cultivating varicose veins and bad knees.

Ms. Diaz had a skinny frame and a pinched face. Behind her was a large circular area where there was a wide variety of chairs interspersed with uniform, dark-orange sofas. This furniture was populated by maybe half a dozen oldsters and their visiting kin. The ceilings were high, somehow putting the dread of death at a distance. The windows allowed in copious light.

I wiped my mostly bald head with a napkin left over from breakfast and said, “Nathan Chambers, please.”

“And who are you?” Ms. Diaz asked with no discernible accent.

“Leonid McGill,” I said. “I’ve come to discuss business with him, representing his daughter.”

The copper woman smiled for the first time.

“Chrystal,” she said.

“Shawna,” I corrected.

The smile went away.

“And what is your business?”

“Shawna wanted me to ask her father about Chrystal and her brother Tally. She’s been trying to get in touch with both of them but hasn’t been able to make contact. She thought Mr. Chambers might have some idea where they are.”

“Why didn’t she come herself?”

“She’s indisposed.”

“Neither Chrystal or Tally have been here lately,” the guardian said.

I was slightly surprised that she’d be so certain of this. There were obviously many residents of the home. Why would she know so much about one single man’s guests?

“Is Mr. Chambers too busy to receive guests?” I asked.

“I’ve answered your question,” Ms. Diaz said stolidly.

On a hunch, I asked, “Do you have a number for Cyril Tyler in your Rolodex?”

“What?”

“If you don’t, I have it. Either way, I’d like you to give him a call. Tell him that you are refusing entrance to Leonid McGill.”

A jolt went through the slender woman’s angry face. She swiveled around in her chair and picked up a phone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying or guess who she was talking to. After a minute or so she turned to face me again.

“Mr. Chambers will be down in a little bit. You can sit in the visitors’ area.”

I CHOSE AN empty orange couch near the southern window. The floor was a little higher than the street and so I could see only the heads and shoulders of pedestrians walking past. I thought that Tally would have a good time here, seeing faces by the hundreds march by.

I had a soft spot for lost young men. That was me back in the days after my father was killed in some South American revolution and my mother died of a broken heart. For the longest time I destroyed young men like Tally for a profit; now I tried to save them—but it was all the same.

“Excuse me,” a voice said.

He wore pajamas that were so light blue someone might mistake them for white. The nightclothes were old, threadbare in spots. But they were clean and the man was sturdy. Five eight with maple-brown skin, Nathan Chambers was near seventy but had not yet crossed that border. He neither smiled nor frowned nor exhibited any other emotion beyond mild curiosity.

“Mr. Chambers?” I said, standing and extending a hand.

His handshake had some strength to it. He had more hair than I did. I’m sure to the casual observer we would have appeared similar in age.

“You look surprised,” he said. “You expectin’ somebody else?”

I sat back down, and he settled next to me.

“No, it’s just, just that I’m surprised that such a healthy man would be in a place like this.”

Chambers grinned, showing me a mouthful of dingy but otherwise strong-looking teeth.

“This is an elder community, young man, not a nursin’ home. I’m here ’cause the retirement pays for it and there really ain’t nowhere else to go. Your ship sink in a storm, you take the first island you see.”

I could see Tally’s features in the older man’s face.

A gray mouse ran along the edge of the windowed wall, stopped a moment to regard us, then hurried off. Nathan noticed me noticing the rodent.

“Cute little things,” he said. “On the cargo ships I worked, their relation, Brother Rat, always had a berth. The sail-ships of old colonized with both man and rat.”

“I wanted to ask you some questions, Mr. Chambers.”

“Call me Nate.”

“Nate,” I said. “I’m LT, Leonid McGill, a private detective.”

“Oh?”

“I’m working for your daughter.”

“Chrystal?”

“Shawna.”

“Shawnie? Where she get the money to hire you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“That’s a Russian name—Leonid.”

“Yes sir, it is.”

“You don’t sound Russian.”

“My father was a sharecropper turned Communist.”

“Negroes do the craziest things,” Nathan Chambers said.

“Here you think you got ’em pegged in the slums and prisons and they turn around like that mouse, or Brother Rat, an’ move to China an’ open a pizza restaurant.

“What Shawnie want?”

“She came to my office and said that her sister was missing and that Cyril, her husband, was planning to kill her, Chrystal. Shawna wanted me to dissuade the husband, but when I went to him he said that he loved your daughter and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

The retiree’s conversational philosophy dried up for a moment. His face became sober and he wondered.

“I love Shawnie, but she’s a mess,” he said at last. “Six children by that many men and movin’ from place to place. You just as likely to find her in a Catholic pew as an opium den. For a few years now she been livin’ with this commune, drift from place to place. They like a wild tribe down in South America, think the whole continent is theirs—tax free.”

“Your son Theodore thinks that she’s probably lying about something,” I said.

“We all lie about somethin’,” the father told me. “The child who never lies don’t make it past Sunday school.”

“Why would Shawna lie about Chrystal?”

“Chrystal reached out for the brass ring an’ come back with platinum,” he said, looking directly in my eye. “Shawnie falled off the hobby horse. She been strugglin’ since the day she was born. Don’t ask me why. She love her sister, though. That’s a fact. But what’s not to love? Chrystal wanted to be a welder like her old man was in the Merchant Marines. I told her she couldn’t and she told me that I was wrong. Damn if she wasn’t right.”

“Tally said that he was the one who asked you for the tools to draw on steel.”

“Oh?” Nate said. “Well, maybe he did. But, you know, Teddy got restless hands. He needed to settle on one thing but never could. Football, baseball . . . drawin’ on steel. He did it all, where Chrystal only cared about one.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Two weeks ago Monday she come by. Brought me some walnut fudge and a little square of steel. Said it was a blank canvas for me if I wanted to do a show with her. Hmm. She a good daughter. The best.”

“You think her mother might know something about her?” I was fishing with the Merchant Marine.

“Azure,” he said, making three syllables out of the word. “I’ont know. I haven’t seen my wife in three years.”

“She’s only a few blocks from here, isn’t she?” I asked. If Nate was a friend of mine I would have kept silent, but this was my job.

“I’d like to see her, I would, but she got nerves. You don’t comport yourself just right and it makes her crazy for days. I bring her flowers every Tuesday, Tuesday. A Miss Rogers at the front desk takes ’em and tells me what she said the week before. I love my wife and my kids, Mr. McGill.”

I believed him.

“I learned when I was at sea,” he continued, “that a black man don’t need to let his head hang down, he could have just as big dreams as any white man or Brahmin, Aztec princess or Gypsy king. I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they’re worth a damn they’re bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls’em down.”

His words washed over me like the ocean they evoked. I ignored the impact for the time being because I had a job to do.

“Do you know where I can find Shawna?” I asked.

“No sir. No, sir, I don’t. I never go lookin’ for Shawnie. You know, a man lookin’ for trouble is sure to find it.”

16

ON THE STREET I felt like an adolescent again—on the run, back under the radar of the foster-care system. This was due to the broken family, missing sister, and words of Nathan Chambers.

. . .
dreams are like oceans
. . .

All the years I had spent hating my father for his laser-like attention and then abrupt abandonment, and it only took these few words to explain him in a way that the twelve-year-old in me could understand. Dreams are like oceans and sometimes they pull the dreamer down.

Just a few blocks from the Schmidt Home, Azure Freshstone-Chambers’ residence, I came upon a desolate park. It was a patch of concrete, devoid of vegetation, with three benches set in a circle, looking out. One of these benches was occupied by a street denizen with a shopping cart, three suitcases, and at least eight neatly squared and piled blond nylon bags. I couldn’t tell if the heavily clothed traveler was male or female, black or white. But these details hardly mattered. I sat down, facing the Hudson, though not looking there.

. . .
dreams are like oceans . . .

Four words and my whole history had been turned on its head, like my father told me Marx had done to Hegel. Forgiveness for his inability was ripped from my chest by this slightly older man who blamed himself for shining a similar light in his own kids’ eyes.

I could smell my neighbor. The odor was musty, dusty, and yet rich like loam. I wasn’t thinking anything, not really. Nate left no room for conjecture. He told the truth, whether he believed it or not, and I was left with consequences that he’d never know he’d wrought.

I NEEDED TO go on with the case, but there wasn’t room for it in my mind right then. I might have sat there in the company of that fragrant phantom for hours if my phone had not sounded.

It was the growling of a bear, a stranger—maybe.

“Hello.”

“What’s wrong, Lenny?” Harris Vartan asked. “You sound upset.”

The tide of my thoughts receded. Vartan was another kind of force of nature.

“I’ll look for the guy,” I said.

“I appreciate that.”

“Tell me something, Uncle Harry.”

“What’s that, Lenny?”

“Did you talk to my father before he left the country the last time?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“That he didn’t want to go but, knowing what he knew, he didn’t know how to stay.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. That’s right.”

“I begged him to stay,” Harris said. “I told him what would happen if he died.”

“So,” I said, the period of his guilty sentence, “what do you have for me?”

There was only a brief pause on the line, Harris paying deference to the pain he knew in me.

“Corinthia Mildred Highgate,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“She knew Williams and last saw him somewhere between ten and twenty years ago. She lived in Manhattan then. Maybe she still does—if she’s alive.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really. Williams knew this Highgate. If you can locate her, and she’s still alive, I’d like you to ask where he might be.”