When the Thrill Is Gone (16 page)

“It’s Ambrose Thurman, ma’am.”

If an inanimate object could hesitate, that’s just what Miss Highgate’s door did. At first it didn’t move at all, then the knob wobbled, shook, turned. It came open maybe three inches and was stopped by a sudden jerk.

“Oh, damn,” she whispered and the door closed again.

There came some clinking and the slither of the chain against the slot and jamb. The knob did its dance. The door slowly swayed until finally a small white woman with blue-gray hair was revealed, peering through thick-lensed round-frame glasses that magnified her eyes.

She was wearing a dark dress with white designs on it. I couldn’t make out the nature of the print because of the looseknit maroon shawl that covered it.

“Miss Highgate,” I said with as kind a smile as a man like me can muster.

“Yes.” The word had finality to it, as if I were the Grim Reaper and she understood she could no longer bar my entrance.

“Can I come in, ma’am?”

“I suppose.”

She was in her seventies and just a little unsure on her pins. We waited a moment for her to move to one side. I walked into the living room of her apartment. It was a good-sized space and mostly bare. No carpeting on the floor, or even curtains in the small window. In the center of the room there was a dark table, maybe oak, and two folding metal chairs. There were some papers stacked on the floor under the window and a pillow next to a doorway that led further into her domicile.

“Spring cleaning?” I asked.

“What?”

“Where’s all your stuff?”

“I hate clutter, Mr. Thurman,” she said. “I had my grandniece throw out or sell everything I don’t need.”

“No TV? No radio?”

“There’s a radio next to my bed, and TV is just a buncha junk.”

I grinned and she said, “Have a seat.”

She smiled down on me, giving the impression that we were old friends together again after many years of separation.

“Would you care for some port?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She doddered out of the doorway next to the pillow and I sat, peacefully plotting my way back into Cyril Tyler’s domain.

I didn’t like it that he had turned me over to the police; that was a dirty trick, in my book. I wanted to ask him about it, but first I needed to look into the children’s allegations about their mother—and I couldn’t do that until the sun went down.

I smiled at the beam of sunlight on the hardwood floor, thinking,
the darkness is my friend
.

Miss Highgate came back into the room with a liquor bottle in her left hand and two tiny green liqueur glasses in her right. She set these down on the graceless table and took the opposite chair.

“Will you pour?” she asked me. “My hands shake sometimes and this is the good stuff.”

Appreciating her choice of words, I pulled out the cork-lined stopper and poured out an ounce for each of us.

It
was
good stuff.

“Lee was your uncle, you say?” she asked at the onset of our second shots.

“My stepfather’s brother,” I said.

“I was going to say that you don’t look much like him.”

Her attempt at humor—I thought.

“Should we take a look at his books?” I suggested.

“Will you pour me another glass?”

I did so, happily.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Thurman?”

“Elevator inspector,” I said. “I’m the guy that signs those little forms that they keep under glass in every car.”

“How interesting.”

“Are you retired?”

“Yes. I worked at Blisscomb’s Cosmetics for forty-four years. I had the same desk the whole time. When I got there it was brand new. By the time I left they called it an antique. That was ten years ago.”

“How do you keep yourself occupied?” I asked, realizing that the biggest price I was going to pay for those books was time and conversation.

“Online poker.”

“Come again.”

“I gamble online. Gambling was one of the things Bill liked about me. He’d take me to Atlantic City and I’d win at the poker table until the pit boss would tell us it was time to go. I see all of the cards of the deck in order in my head. When a card is played it disappears from the array. That way I know what my opponents can and cannot have.

“I played until my hands start to ache. Lee loved to take me to Atlantic City. He used to say that gambling was the best chance a working stiff would ever get.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Twenty-five years. I was nearly forty when I finally met Lee. He used to call it our red-letter day.”

Ah, port wine, the Great Lubricator.

“Um . . . ,” I said, truly hesitant.

“What, Mr. Thurman? What did you want to know?”

“Why did Bill leave?”

“I was a fool,” she said. “My family didn’t approve, and my exhusband wanted to try again, at least that’s what he said. Now that I look back on it I think my mother put him up to it. I told Bill it was over, and right after he was gone Julian left me again.”

She pushed her empty glass at me and I obliged.

She downed the shot and gestured for another.

“Maybe you should slow down a little,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled.

“You might not be his blood but you remind me of him,” she said. “Somebody might think that you’re not to be trusted, but I know better. I knew better about Lee but didn’t follow my own instincts. I still play poker because of him.”

“Can I see those books now, Miss Highgate?”

“I suppose. Will you leave as soon as you see them?”

“I think there’s still a couple of shots left in this bottle.”

She smiled merrily and rose.

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
by Jacques Lacan;
The Descent of Man,
by Charles Darwin;
Kapital; Macbeth, Hamlet,
and
Lear
;
The Gift of Death,
by Jacques Derrida;
The Concept of Anxiety,
by Søren Kierkegaard. These were the volumes contained in an old leather satchel with double-grips for the hand and a strap for the shoulder.

“If he got very excited by something he’d scribble notes in the margins,” Corinthia told me. She was nursing the glass of port I’d poured.

“This is wonderful,” I said. “My sister Katrina will be very happy.”

“Why didn’t you bring her with you?”

“She doesn’t get out of the house much.”

“I understand,” the septuagenarian said, nodding at her own bare cell.

“You say Bill moved to New Jersey when you two broke up?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you remember where?”

“Hoboken. That’s it, Hoboken. I used to have a number, but it got thrown out with the bathwater.”

The lock in the door started making scratching noises.

A middle-aged white woman, maybe forty-five, entered, carrying a plain paper bag by its paper handles. She had a womanly figure and a handsome face. Seeing me stopped her in her tracks the way someone might freeze if they saw a huge gutter roach scaling a whitewashed wall.

“Aunt Corinthia,” she said, looking at me. “Is everything all right?”

“Come in, June,” my hostess said. “Come in. I want you to meet, Mr., um, Mr. Thurman.”

I stood.

June stood still.

I smiled.

Whatever facial expression she made, it wasn’t welcoming.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Mr. Thurman, honey,” Corinthia said. “Come on in and close the door.”

June’s hair was too brown and her breasts stood up like a young woman’s might—the nearly magic technology of dyes and modern-day bras. Her reaction to me could have been panic or passion.

“I came to buy my uncle’s books from your aunt,” I said, putting a crack in the wall of fear that loomed between us.

June was one of those New Yorkers who lived in a world populated by only the people of her choosing. I was sure that she rarely, if ever, talked to strangers, or even wondered at all the brown skins and strange accents that surrounded her on every street. She had her relatives and her church, her friends, and maybe a part-time job—just like any other white Christian woman from the heart of Middle America.

“Junie,” her aunt said. “Come in and meet Mr. Thurman . . . and close the door.”

One of the by-products of such an insular life was an irrational obedience. June wanted to run away screaming but instead she came toward us, a lamb to the slaughter, just like her aunt had been before the application of sweet wine.

“Port?” I offered.

26

JUNE AND CORINTHIA had the same port wine gene; half an hour after her initial fright June was seated upon a third folding chair at the bare table in that unadorned room. She was laughing and free.

I remember thinking that in years gone by those women would have been afraid of me because I (or, more correctly, my dark skin) represented a fear-inducing
other
. But now they felt that they were the other and I was somehow an envoy of the dominant people. They saw my friendliness as a kindness rather than the obeisance that my father’s sharecropper parents offered up with their smiles and deferential silences.

I paid one hundred dollars for the books and two hundred for the old light-brown leather satchel.

June kissed my cheek at the door.

It was a heartfelt kiss, sensual in its innocent placement.

Even though I was there under an alias, I felt I was experiencing a real connection with those women in that tomblike dwelling in the depths of the Upper East Side.

I CALLED MARDI and had her tell Iran to meet me at Rudy’s, a small take-out restaurant on Avenue C.

“Tell him to bring me that special flashlight and the other stuff Bug gave me,” I added.

I GOT THERE first. There were three tables in the place. I sat toward the back, leafing through William Williams’ lost library. I hadn’t read some of the books but I was acquainted with all the authors. I liked Williams’ taste. He was a complex thinker who worried about a pedestrian world. He’d scribbled notes on almost every page.

Evolution makes better murderers
, he jotted on the title page of
The Descent of Man.
Below that he scrawled,
Darwin meets Dante in the sentiments of this title.

I actually grinned at some of his idiosyncratic jibes.

“Hey, boss,” Iran said, pulling me from my intellectual eavesdropping.

It’s funny how a phrase shines a light on what’s happening and then illuminates a path just up the way. Iran worked for Gordo but had been hired by me. Now I was using him as an operative in my evolving relationship to the world.

“You bring it?” I asked.

“Right here.” He placed a plain brown paper bag on the table and sat down opposite me.

“What you readin’?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet. You eat?”

“Some potato chips and a soda.”

I handed him a twenty and said, “Go up to the counter and order us two of the specials.”

While he did this I turned a page on Darwin.

Evolution and politics are inextricably intertwined,
Bill wrote.
The question is, is it a science in the strict sense of the word? And also, can biology somehow replace the domination of Capital?

Who was this guy?

When Iran returned I put away the old hardback and turned my attention to the politics of crime.

“So explain to me this thing with Gorman,” I said.

“I already told you back when you gimme the job at Gordo’s.”

“That was when our lawyer called me and said you were in trouble,” I said. I used Breland to keep tabs on many of the people I had wronged. “He told me that you were in trouble with a man named Gorman but that was all.”

Iran sucked a tooth and said, “He just stupid.”

“Not so stupid he couldn’t find you and kick your ass.”

“Oh, man,” he whined.

“Tell me the story, Iran.”

“Me and Gorman’s brother—”

“What’s his brother’s name?”

“Alvin, but everybody calls him Leech.”

“Uh-huh. Go on.”

“Me and Leech—”

“Hold up,” I said because the cook, in his stained and, in places, singed apron was bringing our meat-loaf platters.

With no ceremony he placed the meals down in front of us, then headed back to his big grill.

“All right,” I said. “Go on.”

“So me an’ Leech was gonna boost these crates of iPads movin’ through this warehouse where a friend’a his was workin’ at.”

“Leech’s friend?”

“Yeah. Only Leech was hittin’ it with his friend’s girlfriend and the mothahfuckah told us where to get in but then he turnt around an’ called the cops.”

“Then why aren’t you in jail right now?”

The look on Iran’s face was perfect, a kind of nonchalant intensity that said,
I will do anything to stay out of jail.

“We run, man. Shit. I jumped ovah a barbed-wire fence an’ almost ran up a wall. Them cops didn’t want any part’a that. You know, I was movin’ like I was in some kinda comic book.”

“Leech, too?”

“We both got away,” he said, “but Leech wouldn’t own up to what he did. He just told his brother that the cops come and he didn’t know why. Gorman blamed me and said I owed him six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars.”