The Long Fall

After a moment or two of this face-off Thurman pulled a huge wallet from his breast pocket, producing a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. One at a time he began putting bills on the low coffee table before us. As he stacked the notes, we both counted. I was experiencing the lust for women and the need for money (or maybe it was the other way round). When Thurman reached one hundred twelve he stopped, put the rest of the stack back in his wallet, and returned the wallet to its pocket.

The heap of bills lay there before me, a come-on that was hard to resist. Through a supreme act of will I managed not to reach out for the cash.

“Just to know,” Ambrose said, “what were the expenses?”

“Those street names you gave me were for underage kids,” I said. “The law, as you know, tries to protect their identities. But I know a cop, got drummed out of the force for an injudicious liaison.”

Thurman smiled at the last two words. He liked pretentious language.

“My friend,” I continued, “has contacts that can get to information without bothering with judges and writs and all that nonsense.”

While paying close attention to my every word, the detective still had the concentration to take a cigarette from a pack in his vest pocket. He picked up a lighter from the table.

“What was this detective’s name?”

He set fire to the cigarette. My nostrils widened, pulling in the aroma. I hadn’t had a cigarette in ten months and I missed them every single day.

“No names,” I said, “remember?”

“Okay. What do you have?”

“Toolie’s real name is Theodore Nilson. He’s doing eighty-six years upstate for aggravated assault.”

“Eighty-six years?”

“Ain’t that a bitch? Poor kid gets his day in court with a defense attorney just outta college and the judge gives him triple-time just for being stupid.

“Jumper’s name is Frank Tork. Frankie’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E.”

Thurman was staring hard at me, submitting my words to memory. I wasn’t worried about being cheated; the money was on the table. The only problem I had was finishing the list.

“Big Jim was born, and died, under the name James Wright. He succumbed to complications from a hot spike on the same day that we invaded Iraq for the second time. I don’t know if the two had anything to do with each other—the heroin could have come from Afghanistan.”

I stopped there, inhaling the secondhand smoke as best I could.

“And B-Brain?” the detective asked when he could see that I was stuck.

The question tightened my eyes.

“B-Brain was the hard part,” I said, stalling now with superfluous information. “He had no record and so didn’t have a floater file in the police records. The other three had other friends. There was a gu CTheHe y named Thom Paxton who they called Smiles, and a girl, there’s always a girl, named Georgiana Pineyman. She called B-Brain Pops for some reason. Georgiana was Smiles’ girlfriend from September to June, but she hung with Pops in the summer because Smiles went away with his family during school break.

“I got it all right here,” I said, taking a thick envelope from my jacket pocket.

“B-Brain’s real name is in there?” the upstate detective asked.

“Yeah.”

Ambrose put out his cigarette and smiled. He lit up another and, taking a deep breath, I sucked up as much of the smoke as I could.

“You know this is just a normal job, don’t you, Leonid?” he said. “It’s not cloak-and-dagger. The client is known to me.”

“Uh-huh.”

At that moment Thurman proved that he was a shrewd judge of human nature. He offered me a cigarette. I really needed one right then. He lit me up and I was genuinely grateful.

Handing me the pack, he said, “Keep ’em. There’s some matches in the cellophane.”

I traded the history of four troubled young men’s lives for nine filterless Camels and eight red-tipped matches.

Ê€„

8

I got back to my street, a block east of Riverside Drive, at a few minutes past eleven. Katrina was at the door before I could get my key out of the lock.

Her presence annoyed me. In all the years of our less than loving marriage Katrina never waited up. She didn’t want kisses or make overtures for sex. She never asked how I was doing or when I was coming back home. She maintained the house and looked after her children and mine. We had a balance, a home life that I could follow like a German train schedule.

“Leonid,” she said, putting her arms around me, kissing my cheek.

She was wearing a frilly pink nightgown and lime-green slippers. Katrina maintained most of the beauty that she’d generated for Zool. She’d put on a few pounds but didn’t look anywhere near her fifty-one years. Her green eyes were actually luminescent.

“I was worried,” she said. She had a slight Swedish accent, which was a little odd since she was born in Queens and, even though her parents were Scandinavian immigrants, they hailed from Minnesota.

“I come home late two nights out of three,” I said, moving away from the embrace. “What are you worried about?”

“You didn’t call.”

“I never call.”

“But you should. I was worried.”