Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“When Liza come to me I figured that either Fortune was playin’ her or they were just believin’ some kinda hype. If he was scammin’ her I’d cut her loose and if he was for real I’d just move ’em out of harm’s way.

“Then, two days after Fortune brought me in, Jones sent us out on this one job where all we had to do was go to this warehouse in Long Island City. There was a young guy made night watchman two years ago. He’d been layin’ out plans to steal a truck that had more than a million dollars of electronics in it. We drove that suckah to an abandoned building over in Brooklyn where there was people waitin’ there to take it over and break it down.”

“What happened to the watchman?”

“Who knows? Vanished in the tunnels till Jones need him for another job.”

“Somebody broke into the office,” I said. “Used explosives on the front door and then broke down the wall to the back office. That sound like your man?”

“Naw,” Twill said through a sneer. “That’s too loud for him. Jones want everything to be quiet like.”

One shore achieved but there were still many rivers to cross.

“Why would they trust you on a job when you just got there?” I asked.

“The only weakness they have is that they don’t think they have no weakness,” my brilliant son opined. “Trouble is, they might be right.”

“Why didn’t you go to Carson?” I asked then.

“The way I see it, Jones got the uppity-ups by the nuts. You know your friend wouldn’t back down so I figured tellin’ him wouldn’t help my client and probably hurt him.”

“You think they might suspect that you’re a plant?” I asked.

“Why would they? I haven’t done nuthin’ except what they said. I did that one job okay. Today I gave out his letters. They don’t suspect me but Jones got these two lieutenants called Marcia and Deck, little younger’n me but serious as a land mine in a nursery school playground. I saw Jones gesture at Fortune with his eyes when Fortune was leavin’ a few days ago and Marcia walked out behind.”

“Fortune get you in?”

“Not really. He told me who to go to. It’s this newsstand near Grand Central. All you had to do was say you was lookin’ for a sales job and that was the way in.”

I stood up and Twill did too. He picked up the pink bucket and we were on our way north.

“Maybe you should get in touch with this Fortune kid and point him over to Hush.”

“A’ight,” Twill said with a nod. “You know I was thinkin’ that maybe we might need Hush on this one anyway.”

“Why?” It had only been recently that I’d read Twill in on my friend’s old profession.

“Jones don’t let anybody share the throne,” Twill said. “Cut off the head, you know.”

“We’re detectives, Twilliam, not contract killers.”

“A’ight.”

“So you think this Jones keeps his power by blackmail?”

“That’s the only thing makes sense, I mean if you got pictures of some council member or mayor’s aide havin’ sex with a twelve-year-old girl, that’s like gold.”

“You know where these records might be?”

“No idea whatsoever.”

Along the way to the apartment I picked up some chives and ice for my fish from a greengrocer. Once home I rinsed the two flounder and put them in the refrigerator while Twill changed clothes. Fifteen minutes after we got home we were off again.

Neither of us recognized the Filipino nun at the front desk of Tivoli Rest Home. When we came up on her she was staring off into space. She had a round face and golden skin. I didn’t know that woman from Eve, as I said, but I was willing to bet from that look in her eye that whatever it was she was thinking it had nothing to do with her Catholic vows.

“Katrina McGill,” I said and she jerked back to awareness. The face of wonder was replaced by one of atonement and loss.

“Sixth floor,” she said.

The only thing different about my wife’s room was that Katrina was not in it. She hadn’t been walking in the hall with Sister Agnes. Her bed was unmade so I thought that she might have gone to the toilet. Without discussing the mundane fact of her absence we decided to wait. I leaned against the windowsill and Twill arranged himself elegantly in the padded visitor’s chair. He was now dressed in black trousers made from light wool, a black silk T-shirt, and a pearl-gray jacket with no lapels or buttons.

“At least she’s walkin’ now,” Twill said after a minute or two. “That first six weeks I don’t think she got outta bed on her own at all.”

“You think she’s doing better then?” I asked my son.

“Better than at first but she kinda stalled the last month or so. I try to get her to walk with me but when I give her my hand all she wants to do is hold it.”

“I told her we could get a nurse at home but she wasn’t interested.”

“I think she wants to be the woman she was before all this,” Twill surmised.

Looking at my son I thought, not for the first time, that he was something like a creature, a baby puma or panther, that I’d found in the wild and brought home. There he slowly took on the form of a human child but his nature was still feral and unfathomable. He had deep feelings for his mother but these emotions were not nostalgic or self-indulgent. She was his mother and I was his father but the world was vast and we, all of us, were just a small part of that immensity.

“Mr. McGill, Twill,” someone said from the doorway.

In her fifties, broad-shouldered, and brown like cured mahogany, Sister Agnes stood there, a questioning look on her face.

“Sister,” I said, propelling my bulk from the window. “Where’s Katrina?”

“I thought you knew,” she said, almost as if the words formed a question.

There are moments in life when the heart makes itself known to the man that lives with his feelings but rarely recognizes them. When Sister Agnes spoke those words I felt the emptiness of the room and a coldness went through me. I could taste the grief that had escaped my lips when talking to my father. At that moment I was beginning to mourn the loss of my wife.

“Didn’t Sister Alona tell you?” Agnes asked.

“Tell me what?” I said in a tone usually reserved for lowlifes and gangsters I intended to hurt.

“That, that she was down at the corner at the Trattoria Lucia,” the big woman stammered.

“What the hell is she doing down there?” My anger would not heel.

“She went there with your father.”

“I thought your father was dead,” Twill asked as we headed for the little restaurant.

I had never told the family that Clarence was probably alive. Why would I? I could hardly believe it myself.

“I just found him recently,” I said. “He came by the apartment last night. I forgot about it because of the break-in and tryin’ to find you.”

“Is that what’s wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?” I said, stopping there on the sidewalk.

“There’s somethin’ definitely wrong with you,” my son averred.

“Wrong how?”

“Like you went crazy or sumpin’ an’ haven’t made it all the way back yet.”

Marella, I thought, or something Marella meant to me; something I had been missing for a long time; but whatever it was, that something didn’t fit where it used to be.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Trattoria Lucia had a smallish dining room with a high ceiling that was deceptive because there were many hanging plants drooping down from overhead. Through the foliage I could see a table for four in the far corner. Seated around various plates of food was Dimitri, my only blood son; Tatyana, his Belarusian girlfriend recently delivered from the East European underworld; Katrina, wearing an alluring blue dress; and Clarence Tolstoy Bill Williams McGill. Katrina, most recently a depressed invalid, and Dimitri, who had always been a sour child, were both laughing.