When the Thrill Is Gone (28 page)

“In a few years you could run a whole office if you went somewhere else.”

“But I don’t want that life. I like it here. I like it a lot.”

“That guy,” I said, “the one who called himself Peters. He came in here with the intention of beating me until I gave him what he wanted.”

“But you didn’t let him.”

“What if he overpowered me?”

“Then I’d call the police.”

“What if he came after you?”

“Get me a gun and teach me how to shoot.”

The first time I had ever been aware of Mardi Bitterman she’d asked Twill for a gun so that she could kill the man masquerading as her father.

“Remember the woman who came in here a few days ago?” I asked.

“The one who said she was Mrs. Tyler but was really her sister.”

“She’s dead.”

“What?”

“Murdered.”

“What happened?”

I told her everything, even Hush’s suspicions about the identity of the assassin. I didn’t need to ask her to keep it quiet; Mardi was a soundproof room unto herself. Her secrets were deeper and darker than anything I had ever known.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve been hoping for something to fall into place, a detail or a mistake on Cyril’s part. But there’s been nothing. So I think I’m going to have to try and set a trap.”

“Will that be dangerous?”

“Extremely. And that’s why I can’t spend my time being worried about you.”

“But, boss . . .” She had never called me boss before, “what you don’t understand is that being in this office with you is the best thing in the world for me. It makes me feel safe.”

“What does?”

“It’s the way you look at me, Mr. McGill,” she said. “That’s the way I want to be seen.”

That was the last of our discussion about Mardi leaving my employ. She was going to work for me and I was going to have to protect her. I shook my head and we both grinned.

“Okay,” I said, “but will you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Go home now. Go home and leave me here to think.”

I TURNED OFF most of the lights in the suite and wandered around the rooms in stockinged feet—plotting. At eight-thirty the sun was still illuminating the city from the farther corner of the western sky. I felt like a foot soldier waiting for the command to go out and die for an idea that I barely comprehended.

I sat down in one of the vacant cubicles in the hallway leading from Mardi’s desk to mine. I put my big feet up on the Formica desktop, wondering about toes, claws, paws, and genetic history.

I sat there, speculating, until the phone rang.

It was as if I were waiting for that call, even though I had no reason to expect it.

“Hello.”

“Leonid,” said my wife of too many years.

“Yeah, Katrina. Why you callin’ the office at this time’a night?”

“I tried your cell phone but you didn’t answer.”

“Oh. Yeah. The phone’s in my office and I got my big feet out here in the hall.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Looking at my toes,” I said. “In the dark.”

“What’s wrong, Leonid?”

“I don’t know. Tell me why you’re calling.”

“Gordo.”

“Something happen?” I sat up straight, suddenly unconcerned with the mystery of evolution.

“Yes and it’s wonderful. He walked down the hall without his walker.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she said through laughter. “Elsa was right behind him, but he made it on his own. It’s been weeks since he’s been able to do that.”

“Yeah.”

“Leonid.”

“What, honey?”

“Come home.”

“Not tonight, baby. I have a serious problem to solve. More than one.”

“Does it have to do with Dimitri?”

I knew she would pick up on her baby’s predicament before long.

“Actually, no,” I said. “He’s in Paris with Tatyana.”

“Paris?”

“Our boy’s growin’ up.”

“That Tatyana Baranovich is nothing but trouble,” Katrina said.

“Just the way the McGill men like ’em, huh, baby?”

“When will he be back?”

“Few days.”

“With her?”

“No doubt.”

“I have to go,” Katrina said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Give Gordo my best.”

“THIS IS Mr. Cyril Tyler’s private line,” prissy Phil said on an answering-machine recording. “No one is here right now to answer your call. If you care to leave a message, wait for the beep.”

No promise to call back. No thank you for calling. I was sure that Phil’s dreams were filled with the desire for unlimited power.

“This is Leonid McGill calling,” I said. “I’ve tried to get to you every way I know, Mr. Tyler, but you’ve snubbed me over and over again. So let’s try this: either you come to my office tomorrow morning or I go to the police tomorrow afternoon.”

I felt satisfied for the first time in many days.

Going down to the utility closet, I pulled out a folding cot, set it up in the aisle and stretched out. I was asleep before my eyes were fully closed.

48

Dreaming is the true genius of man,
my father told me one night after one motherfucker of a nightmare. I was six years old and the previous evening I had seen the fifties science-fiction classic
The Fifty-Foot Woman.
She was chasing me down Broadway. The streets were deserted and my breath was ragged enough that my lungs felt like tattered paper. When my father picked me up I was still screaming. I held on to him so tight that my arms and fingers ached. But I wouldn’t let go. Old Tolstoy carried me to his favorite chair and cradled me, waiting for the sobs and shaking to subside. When I was a little calmer he told me about dreams and genius. He didn’t try to lessen the effect of the dream itself. No. He accepted the fear, and so I did, too. He hailed my shuddering experience as brilliance.

That morning, on the cot in my office hall, I was more than half the way to consciousness but my eyes were still shut and the realm of dreams was close at hand. My thoughts were images instead of logical systems. There was a commune on an upstate farm and a cowboy hitching his palomino to a rail set out just for him. A man wearing a tuxedo but with the cowboy’s face came out through the swinging doors (the commune had become a saloon). The front wall of the establishment came loose from the rest of the building and fell on the two men. The horse was crushed but the fancy gentleman was standing in the doorway, and the broncobuster happened to be situated beneath an open window. They were both standing there unharmed, with dust from the heavy impact rising around them.

“Mr. McGill.”

Cowboys and communes (a word which rhymed with saloon). And then there were peas in a pod and dumb luck, two phrases somehow having the same meaning in my dream.

“Mr. McGill,” a different voice said.

I realized for the first time clearly how difficult constructing a poem must be.

I opened my eyes. Iran Shelfly and Mardi Bitterman stood over me. Their proximity—and me in a bed in a perpetually empty office space—threatened to become my second first draft of a poem that morning.

“Hey,” I said.

Iran had on a mustard suit and a yellow T-shirt, both closefitting, of course. The ethereal Mardi’s dress was cream and crowded with rose-colored roses. I inhaled through my nostrils, expecting the scent of those flowers to narcotize me.

“Time to get up, boss,” she said.

I sat up, fully dressed except for my shoes. I was hungover but hadn’t had a drink. I was an elite mercenary armed with nothing but poetry.

“What time is it?”

“Eight twenty-one,” the ex-con told me.

I scanned the floor, focused on my shoes. Before I could lunge Mardi bent down and actually slipped the boatlike brogans onto my still-stockinged feet. This action soothed someplace deep inside.

“Cyril Tyler is in the outer office,” she said, looking up at my satisfaction.

“What?”

“He was waiting at the door when Iran and I got here,” she continued. “We told him that you weren’t in yet. I didn’t think you were until I realized that only one lock was on.”

“Why didn’t he use the ringer?”

“He was pressing it when we walked up to him.”

That dream was more potent than I imagined.

“What you want us to do, Mr. McGill?” Iran asked.

I stood up, wobbled a bit, and then everything fell into place.

“You go to your desk, Eye. I’m gonna go down to the toilet and wash my face. In ten minutes you bring Mr. Tyler down to see me,” I said to Mardi. “After that get me some coffee and whatever our guest wants.”

The youngsters nodded, and I tried not to feel like I was somehow a fraud.

I FILLED the little bathroom sink with the coldest water I could get out of the spigot then submerged my whole head in the bowl. Fifteen seconds down and I pulled my head out. I gazed at my grizzled face in the stained mirror and dunked down again.

After the third immersion I felt almost good.

Bright-eyed, toweled, and dusted with a rolling adhesive lint remover, I was seated behind my desk, only distantly aware of just how little normalcy my life had in it.

The door swung open. Mardi came in, exhibiting perfect posture, followed by the slouching billionaire.

“Mr. Tyler,” Mardi announced.

He was wearing a blue blazer, white business shirt, black-and-white tennis shoes, and blue jeans. Mr. Cyril Tyler was not designed to wear jeans, especially not blue ones. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter—a mishmash of good intentions and ill design.

And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.

“Good to see you again,” I said.

He nodded and mumbled something, sat in my visitor’s chair and squinted at the light coming in through the windows.

Mardi backed out of the room but didn’t close the door.

“Here we are,” I said to the target.

“What was that message you left supposed to mean?” he asked.

Even when trying to be assertive Cyril seemed vulnerable, weak. He was like the heroic bureaucrat Grand, from Camus’s great novel
The Plague
, the working-class hero.

“I needed to see you, and everything else I tried failed.”

“I was out of town,” he said. “I just got in last night and happened to see the blinking light on Philip’s message machine.”

“Well,” I said in my best placating tone, “at least we’re here now.”

“You weren’t hired by Chrystal, were you, Mr. McGill?”

“No, sir, I wasn’t, but that’s what she said her name was. And you sent Ira Lamont to bully me into saying that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did, but it was his idea, not mine. And, anyway, I shouldn’t have told him to come. I should have waited until I got back to the city and come myself.”

“Excuse me,” Iran said, coming through the open door. He was carrying a gray cardboard box that had two fancy paper cups in it. “Chai latté for Mr. Tyler and a large French roast for Mr. McGill.”

He placed the cups down in front of their respective owners and left, closing the door.

“Where were we?” Tyler asked after the interruption.

“You were telling me why you shouldn’t have sent the cowboy to bully me.”

“I didn’t send him to intimidate you.”

“No? Do you know your brother?”

He threw his hands up.

“Ira said that you had come to the house and demanded to speak to me,” he said. “I, I was in Europe. I wanted to come down and face you when I returned, but he said that that wasn’t a good idea and that he should be the one. He said that you sounded angry and he knew how to deal with that.”

“Your brother said all this?”

“Yes.”

“So why are you here now?”

“Ira said that you didn’t know anything. He said that he thought you were just making it all up. But after I heard that message I knew that he was hiding something from me.”

“And what are you hiding, Mr. Tyler?”

He squinted again, this time not from the sunlight.

“Before I say more, Mr. McGill, I want to know why you came to my house misrepresenting yourself.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “I didn’t misrepresent myself.”

“You just admitted that Chrystal didn’t hire you.”

“Her sister Shawna came to me and told me that she was your wife. She said that you had murdered your first two wives, that you had lost a lot of weight and were having an affair. She said that she was worried that you were going to have her offed, too. She had a picture of you two arm in arm. I did my homework. Your previous wives had died under mysterious circumstances. What was I supposed to think?”

Cyril sniffed as if I had insulted him.

“I was not having an affair,” he said.

“But you did kill your wives?”

Tyler closed his eyes and sat back in the chair. He grimaced and shook his head.

“It’s very hard to explain.”

“I just figured out poetry this morning,” I said. “Try me.”

“For a long time,” he began, “a very long time, I believed that I had an extra-psychic ability—the power to cause harm to people, a power I couldn’t help but despise. If I wanted harm to come to someone, it did. My first wife and I had a fight on our boat. She hit me on the head with a pair of binoculars. I locked myself in the cabin, drank cognac, and nursed an evil hatred toward her. In the morning I was alone on the boat.”

“What about Pinky Todd?” I asked. “You nurse a grudge against her, too?”

“She said that she had information about an investment group I belonged to, that she’d discovered certain illegal transactions we had made. For some reason she thought that she could get a better divorce settlement out of me if she held that over my head.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, “except if the victim had an extra-psychic BB gun.”

“I hadn’t done anything illegal, but I came to a better agreement over a settlement. I was angry. I admit it. And then she was murdered like that. What was I to think?”

“Exactly what Shawna thought—you killed your wife. All that leaves is the affair.”