Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

They didn’t do this when I first came around, but these days at AA meetings they generally invite newcomers with less than ninety days of sobriety to introduce themselves and give their day count. At most meetings each of these announcements gets a round of applause. Not at St. Paul’s, though, because of a former member who came every night for two months and said before each meeting, “My name is Kevin and I’m an alcoholic and I’ve got one day back. I drank last night but I’m sober today!” People got sick of applauding this statement, and at the next business meeting we voted, after much debate, to drop the applause altogether. “My name is Al,” someone will say, “and I’ve got eleven days.” “Hi, Al,” we say.

It was a Wednesday when I walked from Brooklyn Heights clear out to Bay Ridge and collected my expense money from Kenan Khoury, and it was the following Tuesday at the eight-thirty meeting when a familiar voice at the back of the room said, “My name is Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict and I’ve got two days back.”

“Hi, Peter,” everybody said.

I had planned to catch up with him during the break but I got caught up in a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, and when I turned to look for him he was gone. I called him from the hotel afterward but he didn’t answer. I called his brother’s house.

“Peter’s sober,” I said. “At least he was an hour ago. I saw him at a meeting.”

“I spoke to him earlier today. He said he had most of my money left and nothing bad happened to the car. I told him I didn’t give a shit about the money or the car, I cared about him, and he said he was all right. How’d he look to you?”

“I didn’t see him. I just heard him speak up, and when I went to look for him he was gone. I just called to let you know he was alive.”

He said he appreciated it. Two nights later Kenan called and said he was downstairs in the lobby. “I’m double-parked out front,” he said. “You had dinner yet? C’mon downstairs, meet me outside.”

In the car he said, “You know Manhattan better than I do. Where do you want to go? Pick a place.”

We went to Paris Green on Ninth Avenue. Bryce greeted me by name and gave us a window table, and Gary waved theatrically from the bar. Kenan ordered a glass of wine and I asked for a Perrier.

“Nice place,” he said.

After we’d ordered dinner he said, “I don’t know, man. I got no reason to be in the city. I just got in the car and drove around and I couldn’t think of a single place to go. I used to do that all the time, just drive around, do my part for the oil shortage and the air pollution. You ever do that? Oh, how could you, you don’t have a car. Suppose you want to get away for a weekend? What do you do?”

“Rent one.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I didn’t think of that. You do that much?”

“Fairly often when the weather’s decent. My girlfriend and I go upstate, or over to Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, you got a girlfriend, huh? I was wondering. Two of you been keeping company for a long time?”

“Not too long.”

“What’s she do, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“She’s an art historian.”

“Very good,” he said. “Must be interesting.”

“She seems to find it interesting.”

“I mean she must be interesting. An interesting person.”

“Very,” I said.

He was looking better this evening, his hair barbered and his face shaved, but there was still an air of weariness about him, with a current of restlessness moving beneath it.

He said, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I sit around the house and it just makes me nuts. My wife’s dead, my brother’s doing God knows what, my business is going to hell, and I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s the matter with your business?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I set up something on this trip I just made. I got a shipment due sometime next week.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me about it.”

“You ever have opiated hash? If you were strictly a boozer you probably didn’t.”

“No.”

“That’s what I got coming in. Grown in eastern Turkey and coming our way via Cyprus, or so they tell me.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is I should have walked away from the deal. There are people in it I got no reason to trust, and I went in on it for the worst possible reason. I did it to have something to do.”

I said, “I can work for you in the matter of your wife’s death. I can do that irrespective of how you make your living, and I can even break a few laws on your behalf. But I can’t work for you or with you as far as your profession is concerned.”

“Petey told me that working for me would lead him back to using. Is that a factor for you?”

“No.”

“It’s just something you wouldn’t touch.”

“I guess so, yes.”

He thought for a moment, then nodded. “I can appreciate that,” he said. “I can respect it. On the one hand, I’d like to have you with me because I’d be confident with you backing my play. And it’s very lucrative. You know that.”

“Of course.”

“But it’s dirty, isn’t it? I’m aware of it. How could I not be? It’s a dirty business.”

“So get out of it.”

“I’m thinking about it. I never figured to make it my life’s work. I always figured another couple of years, a few more deals, a little more money in the offshore account. Familiar story, right? I wish they’d just legalize it, make it simple for everybody.”

“A cop said the same thing just the other day.”

“Never happen. Or maybe it will. I’ll tell you, I’d welcome it.”

“Then what would you do?”

“Sell something else.” He laughed. “Guy I met this past trip, Lebanese like me, I hung out with him and his wife in Paris. ‘Kenan,’ he says, ‘you got to get out of this business, it deadens your soul.’ He wants me to throw in with him. You know what he does? He’s an arms dealer, for Christ’s sake, he sells weapons. ‘Man,’ I said, ‘my customers just kill themselves with the product. Your customers kill other people.’ ‘Not the same,’ he insisted. ‘I deal with nice people, respectable people.’ And he tells me all these important people he knows, CIA, secret services of other countries. So maybe I’ll get out of the dope business and become a big-time merchant of death. You like that better?”

“Is that your only choice?”

“Serious? No, of course not. I could buy and sell anything. I don’t know, my old man may have been slightly full of shit with the Phoenician business, but there’s no question our people are traders all over the world. When I dropped out of college, first thing I did was travel. I went visiting relatives. The Lebanese are scattered all over the planet, man. I got an aunt and uncle in Yucatán, I got cousins all through Central and South America. I went over to Africa, some relatives on my mother’s side are in a country called Togo. I never heard of it until I went there. My relatives operate the black market for currency in Lomé, that’s the capital of Togo. They’ve got this suite of offices in a building in downtown Lomé. No sign in the lobby and you got to walk up a flight of stairs, but it’s pretty much out in the open. All day long people are coming in with money to change, dollars, pounds, francs, traveler’s checks. Gold, they buy and sell gold, weigh it and figure the price.

“All day long the money goes back and forth over the long table they got there. I couldn’t believe how much money they handled. I was a kid, I never saw a lot of cash, and I’m looking at tons of money. See, they only make like one or two percent on a transaction, but the volume is enormous.