“Did you and Damon practice anyway?” I asked. I was imagining her face as we talked. Damon’s face. Nana’s, too. The kitchen where Jannie was talking. I missed having supper with my family.
“We sure did. I knocked his block right off. I put out his lights for the night. But it’s not the same without you. Nobody to show off for.”
“You just have to show off for yourself,”I told her.
“I know, Daddy. That’s what I did. I showed off for myself, and myself said, ‘Good show.’”
I laughed out loud into the phone receiver. “I’m sorry about missing the boxing lesson with you two pit bulls. Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said in a bluesy, singsong voice. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“That’s what you always say,” Jannie whispered, and I could hear the crackle of hurt in her voice. “someday, it’s not going to work anymore. Mark my words. Remember where you heard it first. Remember, remember, remember.”
I took her counsel to heart in the lonely New York City hotel room as I ate a room-service burger and looked out over Times Square. I remembered an old joke among shrinks: “Schizophrenia beats eating alone.” I thought about my kids, and about Christine Johnson, and then about Soneji and Manning Goldman, murdered in his own house. I tried to read a few pages of Angela’s Ashes, which I’d packed in my bag. I couldn’t handle the beautifully described Limerick ghetto that night.
I called Christine when I thought I had my head screwed on straight. We talked for almost an hour. Easy, effortless talk. Something was changing between us. I asked her if she wanted to spend some time together that weekend, maybe in New York if I still had to be here. It took some nerve for me to ask. I wondered if she could hear it in my voice.
Christine surprised me again. She wanted to come to New York. She laughed and said she could do some early Christmas shopping in July, but I had to promise to make time for her.
I promised.
I must have slept some finally, because I woke in a strange bed, in a stranger town, wrapped in my bedsheets as if I were trapped in a straitjacket.
I had a strange, discomforting thought. Gary Soneji is tracking me. It’s not the other way round.
Chapter 45
HE WAS the Angel of Death. He had known that since he was eleven or twelve years old. He had killed someone back then, just to see if he could do it. The police had never found the body. Not to this day. Only he knew where all the bodies were buried, and he wasn’t telling.
Suddenly, Gary Soneji drifted back to reality, to the present moment in New York City.
Christ, I’m snickering and laughing to myself inside this bar on the East Side. I might have even been talking to myself.
The bartender at Dowd & McGoey’s had already spotted him, talking to himself, nearly in a trance. The sneaky, red-haired Irish prick was pretending to polish beer glasses, but
all the time he was watching out of the corner of his eye. When Irish eyes are spying.
Soneji immediately beckoned the barmon over with a wave and a shy smile. “Don’t worry. I’m cutting myself off. Starting to get a little out of control here. What do I owe you. Michael?” The name was emblazoned on the barmon’s shirt tag.
The phony, apologetic act seemed to work okay, so he settled his bill and left. He walked south for several blocks on First Avenue, then west on East Fiftieth Street.
He saw a crowded spot called Tatou. It looked promising. He remembered his mission: He needed a place to stay the night in New York, someplace safe. The Plaza hadn’t really been such a good idea.
Tatou was filled to the rafters with a lively crowd come to talk, rubberneck, eat and drink. The first floor was a supper club; the second floor was set up for dancing. What was the scene here about? he wondered. He needed to understand. Attitude was the answer he came up with. Stylish businessmen and professional women in their thirties and forties came to Tatou, probably straight from work in midtown. It was a Thursday night. Most of them were trying to set up something interesting for the weekend.
Soneji ordered a white wine and he began to eye the men and women lined up along the bar. They looked so perfectly in tune with times, so desperately cool. Pick me, choose me, somebody please notice me, they seemed to plead.
He chatted up a pair of lady lawyers who, unfortunately, were joined at the hip. They reminded him of the strange girls in the French movie La Ceremonie. He learned that Theresa and Jessie had been roommates for the past eleven years. Jesus! They were both thirty-six. Their clocks were ticking very loudly. They worked out religiously at the Vertical Club on Sixty-first Street. Summered in Bridgehampton, a mile from the water. They were all wrong for him and, apparently, for everyone else at the bar.
Soneji moved on. He was starting to feel a little pressure. The police knew he was using disguises. Only not what he might look like on a given day. Yesterday, he was a dark-haired Spanish-looking man in his mid-forties. Today, he was blond, bearded, and fit right in at Tatou. Tomorrow, who knew? He could make a dumb mistake, though. He could be picked up and everything would end.
He met an advertising art director, creative director in a large ad factory on Lexington Avenue. Jean Summerhill was originally from Atlanta, she told him. She was small and very slim, with blond hair, lots of it. She wore a single trendy braid down one side, and he could tell she was full of herself. In an odd way, she reminded him of his Meredith, his Missy. Jean Summerhill had her own place, a condo. She lived alone, in the Seventies.
She was too pretty to be in here alone, looking for company in all the wrong places, Soneji understood why once they’d talked: Jean Summerhill was too smart, too strong and individualistic for most men. She scared men off without meaning to, or even knowing that she had.
She didn’t scare him, though. They talked easily, the way strangers sometimes do at a bar. Nothing to lose, nothing to risk. She was very down-to-earth. A woman with a need to be seen as “nice”; unlucky in love, though. He told her that and, since it was what she wanted to hear, Jean Summerhill seemed to believe him.
“You’re easy to talk to,” she said over their third or fourth drink. “You’re very calm. Centered, right?”
“Yeah, I am a little boring,” Soneji said. He knew he was anything but that. “Maybe that’s why my wife left me. Missy fell for a rich man, her boss on Wall Street. We both cried the night that she told me. Now she lives in a big apartment over on Beekman Place. Real fancy digs.” He smiled. “We’re still friends. I just saw Missy recently.”