The Long Fall

Some months earlier Katrina joined a gym, had a surgical procedure that transformed her face from middle-age sag into something quite lovely. I had hardly noticed but by an act of supreme will Katrina had regained much of her youthful beauty.

“I’ve met someone,” she’d said, wanting to keep the conversation going. “His name is Andre Zool.”

“Uh-huh,” I managed to say.

“He’s an investment banker and he loves me.”

“I see,” I said but Katrina heard something different, a complaint.

“You haven’t slept in our bed more than two nights in a row in half a year,” she condemned.

“I’ve been sleeping in the office. I’ve been . . . been thinking.”

“I need a real man in my life. Not a zombie.”

“When are you going?” I asked, wondering about the silence in our seven rooms.

“There’s no use in arguing,” she said.

“I’m not arguing. I’m asking you when you’re leaving.”

“Dimitri is going to stay with Andre and me until he finds a dormitory,” Katrina said, having a conversation in another dimension, with a different Leonid. “Shelly and Twill both want to stay with you.”

“But I had blood tests done,” I said from my separate reality. “Dimitri is the only one that’s mine.”

Katrina, in all her Nordic beauty and savagery, stood up from the table, knocking her chair to the walnut floor.

“You bastard!” she said and then stormed out of our apartment.

That was on a Wednesday, too. For six months I had been brooding over the corruption of my life. Katrina leaving meant nothing to me. We hadn’t loved each other for a very long time. We hadn’t ever lived in the same world.

On Monday Terry Swain announced his early retirement.

On Friday Aura Ullman put me on notice for Hyman and Schultz.

By Sunday Aura and I were lovers and I had decided that the only thing I could do was try to make right what I had done wrong. At night Aura and I slept wrapped in each other’s arms. I begged her to come live with me but she had an adolescent daughter and thought that we should give it some time.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER the real estate market crashed.

Andre Zool had been instrumental in getting his company to buy up fourteen percent of Arizona’s recent mortgage debt—and there was some question of kickbacks. He lost over a billion dollars. Zool got on a plane bound for Argentina, where his family had migrated after World War II.

The next morning I came home from work to find Katrina in our living room with our dour son Dimitri at her side.

“Forgive me,” were her only words.

If she had said anything else, anything, I would have been able to send her away: I would have been able to go off with Aura to start a new life.

MY PRIVATE CELL PHONE, the legal one, rang. Actually it made the sound of a growling bear, the special tone I had given to anyone whose phone number came through as private.

“Mr. McGill?” he said. “Ambrose Thurman here. I tried yo" we. I trur office phone but got no answer.”

“Mr. Thurman. I was just about to call you.”

“With good news, I hope,” the fop detective said.

“Yes, very good news. I have located three of the four men you’re looking for.”

“What are their real names and addresses?” he said, his voice brimming with formality.

“There’s a question of remuneration.”

“A question of what?”

“You know what I’m saying—I need my money first.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Yes—remuneration,” he said, repeating the word carefully. “I will have to have all four names before I can pay you.”

“Well, then I’ll call you later.”

I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and sat back in the phantom’s chair.

There was something odd about Ambrose. He was an Albany detective working for an upstate client. This client wanted definitive information on all four subjects before he would pay.

I decided that I’d need more information before handing over what I had to the persnickety, overly formal Albanyite.

But I appreciated his call. Moping over lost love, a loveless relationship, and other things was no good. It tended to give me bad dreams.

In order to keep the momentum toward a healthier state of mind, I entered the code on the electronic lock that allowed entrance to my interior offices. Once I was ensconced behind my ebony desk, looking down over lower Manhattan, I logged onto a specially constructed computer using the ID [email protected]. This allowed me secret entrée to my favorite son’s personal domain.