Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

I looked around but Bug said, “Don’t worry, LT, in order to see this you got to be within three feet and you have to look at it straight on.”

To test this claim I stood up. The words and images blurred into pleasant pastel colors before my eyes. I took three steps away and the colors muted even more.

“In ten years every house in the civilized world will have 3-D TVs like this in the living room,” Bug said when I was seated again. “I hear there’s a sheik in Qatar and an Internet mogul in China got whole ballrooms made from panels like these. Not only will you be able to watch the movie, you’ll be able to get inside it.”

“Pretty great scientific tool,” I said aloud. “You could actually postulate a molecule and then get inside it to see what you thought wrong.”

“Wow,” Bug said. To him I had been a brute until that moment.

“Nice lights,” Lanny the waiter said as he put the soup down in front of me. “But don’t turn up the volume.”

“Tell me what we got here,” I said to Bug when Lanny was gone again.

Bug smiled and I knew I was in for a frightful treat.

“Fourteen hundred and sixty-two names active,” he said. “Those are the names in red. There are other names but they’re coded either inactive, blue, or closed, black.”

“What about all these shades of green?” I asked, not needing any explanation on “closed” files.

“Those are what the system calls tasks,” Bug said. “A task could be a robbery or the end of the line of a smuggling run. The shade of green is judged by the time that the task is expected to happen. The darkest ones are in the next twelve hours; the lighter to lightest are sometime later than that. I don’t show anything happening more than a week from the system clock.”

“Damn,” I said. “There must be three hundred tasks listed.”

I wanted a cigarette.

“Two sixty-seven,” Bug said. He took a sip from his milk shake straw.

“And these lines connecting green tasks to red names are telling us who is expected to be involved?”

“The solid ones,” Bug averred, “and the lines made up from dashes are probable participants.”

“Is the when and where in here?” I asked.

“Mostly. It’s a beautiful system but it’s like he was never afraid of being hacked. There’s no firewalls whatsoever.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Jones figures either he can blackmail or kill anybody try and use this against him.”

“He’s got the army for it,” Bug agreed. “He must have sent one of his kids to MIT or something. This work is beautiful.”

“Here’s your pie,” Lanny said.

I hadn’t heard him come up. He was holding a pink cardboard pie carton by its string handle. Bug took the box and said, “Can you put the whole thing on my bill, Lan?”

“Sure, David. No problem.”

“What kinda pie?” I asked when we were alone again.

“Um... It’s nothing, man. Lemon meringue. I put it in the fridge and take a slice now and then. That’s all.”

His words were an entire history of compensation and loss — the bookkeeping ledger of a young black man’s soul.

“How much information you have on the red names?” I asked to cover the epiphany.

“Almost everything. Addresses, cell phone numbers, even birthdays. There’s also a history list of the ‘tasks’ they were involved in.”

“Take the data from this pyramid and print it out like a report. Have it delivered to my office.”

I put my black hands on the white table, ready to rise and run.

“What about my question, LT?”

I sat back and gazed at the butterball who had exercised himself into the form of a demigod. He was still a child in my eyes. It struck me that Twill had never been that innocent.

“Why you got explosives knitted into every wall in your house, Tiny?”

“For protection.”

“That’s right. You know that you got a house full’a treasure. There are things you know that nobody else does. That’s valuable and dangerous.”

“So?”

“Now think about Zephyra. She can go out with sheiks and kings, princes and billionaires, but she took you.”

“And she still goes out with them.”

“And so you hit the detonator and blow it all to shit. Live with it, brother, or find a new way.”

Bug and I separated at Hudson and Charles, where he turned to visit the old building that he maintained for storage. I suspected that he was going there to gorge on the pie.

I continued up Hudson double-thumbing my phone as I went.

“Is anything wrong, Mr. McGill?” she asked on the sixth ring.

“How’s the southern hemisphere?” I asked.

“We’re on a deserted beach,” Zephyra said, a little breathless. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Have you ever been here?”

“South Africa, yeah,” I said. “But what I saw was not beautiful.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“I think it’s time for you to come home, Z.”

“But I just got here.”

“I know. But you leaving hit Bug so hard I don’t think he’ll make through all those nights. Know what I mean?”

“I can’t put my life on hold for some guy who never learned how to take one step at a time,” she said coolly. “I like David but I don’t owe him anything.”

“That’s a fact,” I agreed. “But there’s another one.”

“What’s that?”

“If David fell back in on himself and I didn’t tell you about it first, I might lose the best Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant I ever had.”

She took a beat to digest my words and then asked, “Do you need anything else?”

“If you have the time.”

“He’ll fly me back on the private jet,” she said. “I can do everything over the Internet on the eight-hour flight.”

“It’s more like eleven, isn’t it?”

“Not if you fly in an SST.”

I called the Hotel Brown, got connected to Marella’s room, and had her order champagne, oysters, and caviar — all on ice.

“Are we celebrating?” she asked.

“It’s more like a going-away party.”

“Are we going somewhere?”

“Just me,” I said. “Just for the day tomorrow.”

“That hardly rates a party.”

“There’s a celebration in my heart every time I see you, girl.”

“You’re not going to start talking about love, are you?”

“What’s love got to do with it?”

Katrina sounded truly sad that I wasn’t coming home.

“Sorry, honey,” I said, making a rare apology for an absence. “But I have to go down to Philly to tie up some loose ends. You and Clarence can go out to dinner or something.”

“Bill went home this morning. He told me that he wanted you to call.”

“You got his number?”

“Hold on.”

“No, Katrina. Just text it to me. I’ll call him when I can.”

“I have a lot to talk to you about, Leonid.”

“I’ll be back in a day or so.”

Marella and I nibbled and sipped the icy treats and then we had sex like two lifers allowed their first conjugal visit in years.

I left her asleep in the bedroom of her suite at 5:30 the next morning, but before I was out the door she called to me, “Lee?”

She was standing three steps behind me, naked.

“What?” I asked.

“Where are you going?”

“Down to Philly.”

“Eddie and Camille again?”

I was surprised that she remembered my little story on the train. Then I remembered that she was a con artist; that meant she had to remember everything, both truth and lie.

“Yeah, it seems like Eddie had some unfinished business with a guy selling protection in the mall. I’m going down there to take an elevator ride with him.”