Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“In prison?”

I nodded and a hint of concern entered her eyes.

“I love him,” she said, connecting the fear with this revelation. “I don’t want him hurt.”

I smiled.

“You find that funny?” she asked, the woman she’d become echoing in her tone.

“You got a man with his comrades mostly slaughtered and him sitting on death row for the murder of two cops. His lawyer has betrayed him. Judges in the high court are whispering that he will most certainly die. And here you think I might be the one to bring him pain.”

“What... what about his wife and child?”

“What about them?”

“Shouldn’t they be made aware of your plans?”

“I will not share my plans with you or anyone else, but if everything works out, Mr. Man will be able to make his own decisions.”

I could see that she was about to ask another question and many more after that, but then the buzzer sounded.

I didn’t even look through the peephole.

Mel was standing there wearing a corn-colored suit with a black shirt underneath.

We didn’t speak. I walked him over to the desk and Willa stood. She was both fascinated by and afraid of this man. He looked at her like an evolved tiger might, through self-imposed bars.

Mel pulled up a chair.

After her usual hesitation, Willa sat too.

Those few days held the most potent experiences in my life up until that point. It was as if every nerve had the volume turned up and every perception had a dozen meanings — all of which I understood and profited from.

“This is going to be a short meeting,” I said. Then, turning to Willa: “My friend here is going to give you something and you will take it into that room for private meetings with lawyers. You will give him the packet and say that you got it from a friend. Don’t tell him any names. Do not indicate anything about us, including gender, knowledge we might have, or about any investigation. He will take the item and make up his own mind.”

“What will the note say?” Willa asked.

“That has to be between us and him,” Mel said in a surprisingly soothing voice. “That way everyone is protected.”

“They search you down to your underwear when you go in to visit a death row inmate.”

Mel reached into his pocket and came out with a small box with the name A Summer’s Day printed over a field of windblown grasses. It was a popular feminine hygiene product — a packet of three tampons. He handed the box to the young lawyer and she took it.

“The seals are intact and the price is stamped on the bottom,” he said.

“But I won’t be having my period Monday.”

“Then it must be coming on,” he said with an irrepressible wolfish tone.

“Just give him the packet,” I said. “The note is inside.”

“Tell him to keep it hidden and tear it open when he’s back in his cell,” Mel added. “If you follow these instructions to the letter, he will have a fifty-fifty chance of being saved.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, looking directly into my friend’s dead eyes.

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Her nostrils flared and I wondered if she was turned on by the power pulsating behind those words.

“Okay,” Willa said to me. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

After she was gone I took out a very old port and served.

“You think she’ll do what we said?” Mel asked.

“I’m pretty sure. He’s a man she loves and we’re the only show in town.”

“The only one,” Mel agreed. “Now, how about this place?”

“It’s called Treacher Admitting on Maiden Lane just a couple of blocks east of Broadway.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“It doesn’t advertise. They mostly serve rich patients from Wall Street, but they have a deal with law enforcement; free medical attention for certain protections.” I paused and then asked, “What about the powder?”

“It’s what they call a derivation of the shigella bacteria,” Mel explained. “Targets the appendix but has a short life span, just long enough for our purposes.”

“Not that I’m complaining,” I said. “But how does a self-educated heist man turned watchmaker get his hands on something like that?”

“Whenever I get put away I try for the sentence to be carried out in a prison where there’s a lotta Russians. They always have the most organized gangs and they’re connected to people from the old country and Eastern Europe in general; those people often have ties to intelligence. This little poison comes straight from the defunct laboratories of the KGB.”

“Damn.” I was impressed. “I’ll give you the plans to the clinic. Their security is not so strong seeing that they rely on the cops and the fact that nobody knows they’re there. Because there’s so many cops I need to stay away as long as I can.”

“I got that covered.”

We finished our wines and then poured two more.

I spent Sunday morning wondering how I kept my lawless side down for so long. That train of thought brought me to the realization that I no longer missed being a policeman. I’d been a good cop in my own estimation, but that shit nearly got me killed.

I wasn’t a criminal, not exactly. But those flexible rules of law could not bend as far as I was willing to go; as I needed to go.

The Internet news told of how William James Marmot had a crazy story of being kidnapped, shot, tortured, and then made to write the confession pinned to his chest. Under the threat of death he merely wrote what his masked captor dictated. He was a victim and not a criminal mastermind. Marmot was put in a hospital, but sometime after midnight, he evaded his police guard and effectively disappeared.

I went to a reinvented old-time boxing gym in Dumbo at noon. There I lifted some weights and did a dance with the heavy bag for an hour or so.

When I got back to the office there was a message on my office line.

“Mr. Oliver, this is Reggie Teegs. I’m an unofficial representative of the parties that you’ve been negotiating with. We would all like to keep this matter outside the legal system, and so if you call me we can meet and I will offer you a settlement on behalf of my clients.”

He left a phone number that I was sure could not be traced.

I considered calling Mel but decided that I shouldn’t rely too heavily on him. I thought that maybe it would have been prudent to wait a week or so before responding, but that didn’t feel right either. Something about Teegs’s request sounded like an immediate threat.

“Mr. Oliver,” he said upon answering.

I had walked all the way to Park Slope to call him from a phone booth in a small restaurant I frequented. It could have been a call from anybody, but he knew that the only ring that line would be getting had to be from me.

“So?” I said. “What is it?”

“We have to meet.”

“I haven’t been very lucky with clandestine meetings in this century,” I said.

“You choose the place.”

“Columbus Circle mall, fourth-floor wine bar,” I said, “in thirty minutes.”

“Done. You’ll know me because I will be the only man there wearing a herringbone jacket with an orange bow tie.”

I reached the fourth-floor, inside, open-air wine bar in twenty-eight minutes. He was drinking cognac from a snifter and looking about him like some kind of humanoid alien examining the rituals of an alien species in a forsaken corner of his cosmic domain. Preternaturally thin, he was what passed as a white man, but his coloring was olive and his black eyes were startling, even from a distance.

I told the hostess that I saw my friend. She smiled and moved aside. As I walked toward him he took no special notice. This told me that he wasn’t armed with a photograph.