When the Thrill Is Gone (14 page)

She approached me suspiciously. I held the door for her and slammed it as soon as she cleared the threshold.

I could hear her muffled cry from the hallway but that was of no concern to me. It was a heavy door and there was a bolt, so I threw it. There was also a lock, which I turned.

The children had organized themselves behind Fatima. She was standing behind her stool, the dark-skinned two-year-old boy in her arms.

“Where’s your mother, honey?” I asked the girl.

“Are you going to save us?” she asked.

“I’m gonna try my best.”

“She’s gone away to sleep.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night. I was asleep and then I woke up and saw the man . . . he was climbing out the window.”

“Did he take her with him?”

She shook her head, holding back the tears with that motion.

“Then where is she?”

“Beria and them took her to the compost heap behind the People’s Garden over at St. Matthew’s. They put blindfolds on us to take us there but Boaz recognized it because the one time he ran away that’s where he hid.”

“But she was . . . asleep before then?”

Her nod had all the slow solemnity of a funeral march.

Somebody knocked on the door—with a battering ram.

22

“I HAVE TO ASK you a question, Fatima,” I said to the head child.

She looked at me, hardly shuddering when the heavy object hit the door a second time.

“Do you want me to take you and your brothers and sisters out of here?”

She cocked her head and squinted as if trying to decipher a new slang.

“I’ll take you out of here if you want to go, if you want to come with me.”

She nodded and the children huddled closer around her.

THE DOOR TO their unit was the fireproof kind; plated with thin but durable metal and, most probably, reinforced on the inside. I propped a chair up against the doorknob. The heavy object shook the barricade hard enough for me to see the hinges move.

With Fatima’s help I herded the kids to a fire escape that I’d located the moment I walked in. One little girl grabbed her favorite doll, and her brother, who was no more than ten months her senior, picked up a ray gun. I didn’t try to stop them. Getting in the way of a child’s imagination will almost always take more time than it’s worth.

Fatima’s toddler brother was crying. She handed him into my arms while urging her siblings through the window. The door shook again, causing the unfamiliar sensation of fear to blossom in my lungs.

The little boy stopped crying as soon as he could hide his face against my chest. We were the last two out on the fire escape. The others were scampering down, led by their courageous sister. She released the ladders and went from floor to floor, making sure that we were all safe. The second-floor landing was bolted and her hands weren’t strong enough to throw the latch. I was about to bend down when she kicked the iron rod and the trapdoor fell through, allowing my newfound brood to clamber down to the sidewalk.

“Hey, you!” a voice shouted from above.

I didn’t look up. Why would I? I knew that they’d be after us. Sometimes you just have to make the best of what you find.

I’m not superstitious as a rule, but when I saw the yellow cab trawling D for a fare I hoped that I hadn’t used up my taxi-karma on the guy I forced to drive to Brooklyn.

“Cab!” I shouted in a voice I hadn’t used in a long time.

He pulled to a stop.

“Get ’em all in,” I said to Fatima.

A chorus of complaint roared out from the window and fire escape above.

“Goodbye!” I yelled up at our pursuers as Fatima hurried the kids along. “We’ll see you when we get back from the zoo!”

I jumped in, gave the driver an address I knew well, and prayed for green lights.

IN THE CAR, with the toddler on my lap, I sighed. The fear I felt had nothing to do with my personal safety but with the jeopardy my actions may have placed the children in. I was pretty sure that my client was dead, and that the children were in greater danger in the fortress than they would be with me—but still . . .

I inhaled the various odors that cling to children. We were a few blocks away from the escape and I doubted that anyone would catch up to us.

If they did that would be their bad luck.

“Fatima,” I said.

The child looked up at me. She was holding the hands of the four- and the five-year-old that separated her and her brother.

“Was your mother hurt?”

She nodded. The tears were behind her. I felt that she had swallowed the pain for all her brothers and sisters, that this child had already seen more hardship than I’d accrued in all my brutal fifty-five years.

“Was she scared about anything before that?”

“Mama was always scared about somethin’,” she told me. “She said that there was a robber behind every door, even in the big house.”

“The big house?”

“That’s where Ivan lived with us all.”

“Was Ivan your mom’s boyfriend?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did he hurt her?”

“Uh-uh. It was the man who climbed out the window.”

“I’m going to take you to the house of a really nice lady and her daughter,” I said, wanting to veer away from the underlying pain of loss.

“We want to go stay with our Aunt Chris,” Fatima said.

“Yeah,” one of her little sisters agreed.

“As soon as I find her I’ll be happy to take you to her,” I said. “But I have to get you someplace safe before that.”

“What if we don’t like it there?” the elder child asked.

“If you don’t, then you don’t have to stay.”

She nodded once, and I had to remind myself that she was a child and not the woman she seemed to be.

AURA ULLMAN OWNED a very large top-floor apartment on Gramercy Park West. Her living room window looked down on the private square of green.

Aura’s seventeen-year-old daughter buzzed us through the ground-floor entrance and opened the door once we’d climbed our way to the top. Theda was five ten, weighing no more than a hundred and five pounds with blue-black skin, gray eyes, and wavy brown hair that marked her complicated heritage.

“Hi, Uncle L,” she said, smiling. “Who’re your friends?”

She lowered to her haunches and Fatima’s hard heart melted. The two hugged each other and the rest of the brood surged forward to get in on the action.

“Is your mother here?” I asked.

“You know she’s at work,” the teenager replied. And then she asked the kids, “Are you guys hungry?”

THEY HAD TOMATO Soup, frosted flakes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, orange juice, milk, and three Cokes. Fatima made sure that all her brothers and sisters sat neatly around the kitchen table while she carried the youngest, Uriah, on her hip.

“Sure they can, Uncle L,” Theda was saying to me. “Mama won’t care if I say okay.”

We had tried to call Aura but she wasn’t answering any of her phones.

Because of her position in real estate, Aura was able to procure her ideal condo. I knew she had the space and the compassion to protect the kids. I would have taken them to my place if it wasn’t for Gordo dying there.

“Tell her it’s only until I find their aunt,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Theda assured me. “Mom likes kids.”

I needed information but it was better to leave the brood under Fatima’s care for a while before asking more questions.

I took out my phone, where I found a text from Mardi saying
K io. Wfu.
Kitteridge in office waiting for you
.

23

“DO YOU MIND if I borrow something from your mom?” I said to Theda. She and Fatima, and to a lesser degree Fatima’s nearest sibling, Boaz, were organizing the children around the living room’s plasma TV to watch the animated Disney film
Ponyo
on pay-per-view.

“’Course not, Uncle L,” she said.

AURA’S BEDROOM HAD the same sweet scent that I remembered from nearly two years before. I closed the door to the hall and then went to the wall-wide closet. Behind her clothes, underneath a silk scarf hanging, there was a wall safe. I knew the combination.

Inside there was an array of pistols and ammunition, among other things. One gun was a German Luger that had belonged to her father, a Togoan army officer who had gone rogue. He used that selfsame pistol to kill himself before he was to be tried for his crimes. There was a .22, a .32, and a .45 Aura had stockpiled from various offices and apartments that her crews cleaned out over the years. There was also a short-barreled .41-caliber sixshooter that belonged to me. I had left it with her one night when I was going out to meet with a man who had raped my client—Madeline Rutile.

His name was John Ball, and to most of the world he appeared to be an innocent. But when he got on the scent of a certain style of woman his gentility turned into regular intervals of bruising, biting, and humiliation that she would dread daily and carry with her for the rest of her life.

I had a meet set with John Ball one late evening—a job interview, you might say. It was the new, semi-rehabilitated me, pretending to be the old me. He was going to ask me to plant evidence on one of his victims. Her name was Jenna Rider. I had found out, from a weeklong investigation, that Jenna was another one of Ball’s victims. John typically picked women who had something to lose if they went to the police. That way he could rape them with impunity. John was in possession of evidence that Jenna had been involved in an embezzlement scam at a previous job. I convinced Jenna to pretend to have filed a complaint against her tormenter—John. Then I had Randolph Peel, a dishonorably dismissed NYPD detective, get in touch with Ball to tell him of the impending indictment. For twenty-five hundred dollars he turned over the falsified records to the rapist. After that he threw my name at him, told him I was the kind of guy who could whack the girl and plant evidence in such a way as to gut the case against him.

This was business as usual for a guy like me. I have never, in my life, colored within the lines.

The night I was going to meet with John I was first at Aura’s. My clothes and gun were on her pink-and-aqua chair. When I told her what I was going to do she made me leave my gun.

“You might lose your temper, Leonid,” she said, “and kill him.”

“He’d deserve it,” I replied.

“But you do not.”

I left the pistol and went to Ball’s office. When he put out a hand in friendship, I coldcocked him.

I had expected to come away just with the information he kept on Jenna but instead I hit the jackpot. John kept a file cabinet with two drawers in his office. The top stack was the evidence he’d gathered on more than thirty women. The bottom held pictures, videos, and other remembrances of his predatory romps. Six of the files were still active—including my client’s.

Aura was right. I would have killed him right there if I had kept my gun. Instead I relieved him of the contents of the top drawer.

I reported the attack on Ball to a cop named Willis Philby, whose specialty was sexual predation. I made my departure before the cops got there, leaving a couple of damning pictures out in plain view.

Charges were made and John, who has resources, is still on trial today. I returned the various files to their victims and bought Aura a single cabochon ruby depending on a slender 24-karat gold chain.

“MOM CALLED,” Theda told me when I came out of the bedroom a couple of pounds heavier.

“What she say?”

“That we’d see when she got home. But I could tell that she’s going to say okay.”

ON THE STREET I felt safer with the pistol in my pocket. I had a carry license and reason to feel threatened. Beria might very well be looking for me. Maybe Shawna wasn’t actually dead, but I had to play it like she was. The children needed time to calm down and feel safe before I could question them; Aura’s presence would accomplish that end.

In the meantime I had to protect myself while roaming the streets of New York.

I’d been paid a lot of money, but for what purpose was not clear.

Shawna hired me to protect Chrystal, but now Shawna herself might be the victim. Cyril wouldn’t be climbing through eighthfloor windows to murder women, but his money could hire a whole regiment of black-ops mercenaries to accomplish such a task.

This speculation was all fiction, pulp fiction, not worth the calories it consumed.

WARREN OH, the Afro-Sino-Jamaican, was at the front desk of the Tesla Building. He was a beautiful man: sixty but looking forty, with two children, half a dozen grandchildren, and a mother who was pushing the century mark.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren said.

“Mr. Oh.”

“Are you in for the afternoon?”

A solitary note tolled. It was the sound of the bell that started or ended a round. I looked at my phone.