And Sometimes I Wonder About You (2 page)

“W
hat kind of work do you do?” she asked, turning in her leather seat and lifting her right ankle up under the left thigh. That way she could look at me while watching both ends of the nearly empty car.

“There’s a guy named Eddie and a woman named Camille,” I said.

My new neighbor leaned back against the window and smiled. She didn’t mind hearing a roundabout answer.

“Eddie is, or at least he was, a what you call undocumented laborer from Central Mexico, a farmer that could read and write. Camille is an investment banker, more Madison Avenue than Wall Street.”

“What’s the difference?” my temporary companion asked.

“What’s your name?” I replied.

That turn got her to grin. She looked both ways down the aisle like a cautious pedestrian and said, “Marella. Marella Herzog.”

“Interesting name,” I mused. “Where’s it from?”

“I think the origin for Herzog is German.” Her smile was as opaque as the answer. “Marella is Italian.”

“Wall Streeters are solitary sharks, Marella,” I said, relishing the name. “Madison Avenue is populated by social animals—mostly wolves.”

“What about Eddie and Camille?” she asked.

“At the same time and in very different spheres Camille and Eddie got tired of their roles in life. She began doing charity work, not giving money but rolling up her sleeves and going down to shelters. She also represented dozens of undocumented laborers in court—gratis.

“Around then, Eddie was honing his English, becoming a florist’s assistant, and studying for his citizenship exam.”

“Don’t tell me,” Marella said. “He was arrested by the INS and she got his case.”

Before I could answer, Marella looked up suddenly, seeing something at the front of the car. I turned my gaze and saw a tall, olive-skinned man with a scar along the right side of his nose like an editor’s diacritical marking. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and gray slacks. Slender and likely strong, he reminded me of an unsheathed hunting knife—both haft and blade.

I say “tall” because he was a shade or two over six feet, but really most American men are tall compared to me. I’m half an inch under five and a half feet. What I lack in height I like to think I make up for in muscle. I weigh one eighty-three most mornings and not too much of that is fat.

The taller man’s body didn’t slow down as he passed our aisle but his eyes did. Those dark slits took her in—glanced at, and then dismissed, me. He didn’t look crazy and so I remained calm.

When he passed through the back door of the car I said, “No. Eddie brought a woman from his Bronx apartment building to Camille’s after-hours, downtown office on Bowery.”

The woman calling herself Marella Herzog took in a deep breath through her nostrils and looked back at me with what I can only call a bit of pride.

“And he spoke such perfect English that she fell in love with him,” she said.

“Something like that. Eddie knew a world that offered her something, and she was like the Statue of Liberty as far as he was concerned. They shared intelligence, he passed his citizenship test, and she stopped worrying about where banking could take her. It was like a multicultural fairy tale until about a month ago.”

“So you’re a marriage counselor?” Marella guessed.

“One morning Camille woke up in her Park Avenue South condo and found Eddie gone. He’d taken with him his four pairs of cotton pants, six shirts, shoes, and toothbrush.”

“You’re a PI.”

“She called me after the police told her that it was just a man leaving a woman. I found a trail of calls and a few bills that led me down to Philly. I spent the week in the City of Brotherly Love buying roses. It took longer than I expected because Eddie had opened his own kiosk in Reading Terminal Market. I talked to him about Mexico in my best Cuban Spanish and he said that he loved it in America. After fifteen minutes of yacking I told him that I worked for Camille and that she wondered why he ran away.”

“What did he say?” I think at that moment she had almost forgotten the olive-skinned hunter that had marked her with his slow eyes.

“People were always looking at him,” I said. “White people, other Mexicans, policemen. He had started to feel that he didn’t belong with Camille or in her world. He felt that he brought nothing to the table and the table belonged to her.”

“Wow,” she said, pursing her well-formed dark lips. “That’s some kinda man, huh?”

“I told him that my father told me that the first thing a farmer learns is that the man doesn’t own the soil but the earth owns him. The same thing, I said, was true of tables and monies and fancy streets.”

“Your father sounds like a wise man.”

“Yeah. Maybe too wise.”

“What did Eddie say?”

“He hugged me. Threw his arms around my neck and pressed his cheek to mine. I think he must have been hoping for a sign to go back home.”

“To Park Avenue,” Marella said.

“To Camille.”

“So did he?”

“She came down this morning, paid my fee, and took her man to the Belmont Arms.”

“That’s a wonderful story,” Marella Herzog said. She placed a hand on mine.

“Why don’t you tell me one,” I suggested, turning my palm upward to press against hers.

“What would you like to hear?”

“Why a stunningly beautiful woman like you would ask to sit next to an old, off-the-rack straphanger like me.”

“You looked like a strong man and so I wanted to sit down next to you.”

“Not before you asked Haystack back there,” I said.

“He looked a little stronger,” she admitted with a smile.

“And what use do you have for strong men?”

“You saw the guy who walked by?”

I nodded.

“He works for a man that I was engaged to down in DC. I saw him on the Acela to New York and got off in Philly. I guess he saw that and followed me.”

“And what does this man want?” I asked.

“To take me back.”

“Why?” I said, thinking about Camille. She was a plain woman with naturally blond hair and a figure made for a
’
40s film. She asked me to find Eddie, and when I did she came to him.

“He broke off the engagement. I’m pretty sure he wants the ring back.”

“Why not give it to him?”

“Because it became my property when he gave it and I accepted,” Marella said with all the commitment of an outer-borough storefront lawyer.

“But if he’s so adamant why not let him have it anyway?”

“Because I will not be intimidated by thuggery.” Something about her choice of words
seemed…unnatural.

“If that was true you wouldn’t be using me as a buffer.”

She turned to look out the window. We were entering the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey.

After a moment or two she said, “I sold it, got quite a bit of money.” Then she turned to face me again. “Are you a strong man, Mr. McGill?”

“I think so.”

“Can I trust you?”

“In what circumstance do you mean?”

“I need protection.”

I pretended to think about her request, but the answer was a foregone conclusion. After a beat, maybe two, I nodded. “Sure.”

“Sure I can trust you or sure you will help me?”

“Both.”

“And, if you don’t mind me asking, why should I trust you?”

“Because I work for money.”

Marella’s smile seemed to enhance her forest scent.

“M
y bag is two cars up,” she told me a few minutes before we pulled into Penn Station.

“Let’s go,” I said, in a tone that I hoped exuded simple certainty.

We jostled through the cars as the few other passengers were standing up, gathering their jackets and bags.

The train’s swaying made our walking like a conga line on a drunken beach somewhere.

“That’s it,” she said, pointing at an overhead rack. It was a substantial black bag festooned with large pink polka dots. The decorations were frivolous so I was a little surprised at the weight of the suitcase.

“You put this up there yourself?” I asked and then grunted, lowering the bag to the floor.

“Two young men helped me,” she said.

It has always amazed me how a woman’s eyes and her words can find a direct line to my animal heart.

I wrangled the festive bag out onto the platform, then rolled it with Marella at my side. We rode up a half-stage escalator into the middle aisles of Penn Station. She was looking around nervously but I stared straight ahead. I had already seen the man-knife in the reflection of a window on our train. He was close behind us but nearly hidden behind a redcap’s overfull cart.

Even when I lost sight of him I knew he was near us somewhere.

I made a turn down a fairly empty corridor and Marella asked, “Where are we going?” There was fear in her voice, but whether it was due to her pursuer or maybe to some danger I represented, I could not tell.

“Baggage elevator,” I said. “This sucker is too heavy to lug up the stairs. What you got in here anyway?”

“My whole life.”

“That’s either way too little or far too much,” I said as we reached the dull and pitted chrome doors of the elevator car.

I pressed the Up button but the light was out. I couldn’t remember a time when it worked.

“You’re different than you were on the train,” she said as we stood there.

“Then I was on the train,” I said, “now I’m on the job.”

“That reminds me, what are you charging to carry my bag?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Well…if all I have to do is walk you to a taxi I’ll accept a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. But if I have to play bodyguard and make sure that you’re unharmed then the going rate is fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Fifteen hundred!” she exclaimed with a broad smile on her lovely mouth.

“I couldn’t be trusted for less.”

Her nostrils flared and I wondered if I had paid my latest life insurance premium.

“Are you really as tough as you act, Mr. McGill?”

“I truly hope that neither one of us has to find that out today.”

The elevator doors opened and people began to disgorge; five travelers and a bright-eyed redcap whom I’d run into over the years ferrying first-class and infirm passengers along the uncharted routes of the station. His name was Freddy Mason, and his wife I thought might have been Yee.

Marella and I stood aside as the crowd moved past. Then Freddy came out pushing his cart. When he saw me he nodded and frowned. Then, seeing my pickup client, he smiled.

There was no one else waiting for the elevator, which I regretted, and there seemed to be no one else around. So I ushered Marella Herzog into the empty chamber and girded myself for what I knew was coming.

When she was against the corrugated back wall of the metal car I set the suitcase up in front of her—to create an extra buffer. I looked up at the polished metal reflector in the left corner and saw him coming even before Marella yelled, “Watch out!”

He timed it almost perfectly. The doors were already closing when he lunged through. There was something in his left hand. It could have been a pistol but I suspected a more intimate weapon. Either way I’d have to turn before he could expect me to cower in fear.

All those years working out in Gordo’s boxing gym had honed my reflexes until they almost had minds of their own. I couldn’t go ten rounds anymore but in a profession like mine survival was rarely about endurance.

Already low to the ground, I crouched down and spun on my left heel. I grabbed his left wrist and broke it with one fast torquing motion but I had no intention of stopping there. I raised up and delivered a left uppercut to the tall man’s jaw before seeing the hunting knife he had dropped when his wristbone broke. I grabbed his head with my right hand and slammed it against the wall. It bounced very nicely and my client’s stalker, whoever he was, fell unconscious to the floor.

I glanced up at Marella. If she had any response it was not in her face.

Moving quickly, I set the olive-skinned man in the back corner to the right so that it looked as if he was sitting there, grabbing some sleep where he could. That way the first thing an unsuspecting passenger might have thought was that he was a drunk using a public conveyance as his bedroom.

I noticed that he was still breathing.

That was fortunate.

Our luck held, because there was no one waiting for the baggage elevator. We had taken nineteen steps before someone yelled for help.

Twenty-eight steps later we were taking the escalator up to the Eighth Avenue exit. It was there we saw four uniformed cops come barreling down the stairs.

“Should we try to run?” Marella whispered in my ear. Those were the first words she’d spoken since the encounter.

“Only if we want to get caught.”

There was a long line waiting for cabs at that time in the afternoon. The sirens of two police cars and one ambulance wailed to a stop not half a block away from us. While policemen and paramedics hurried into the station, Marella and I attached ourselves to the end of the taxi line.

“I guess I owe you some money,” she said after a few minutes’ wait.

“Fifteen hundred.”

“Will you take a check?”

“No.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. She wasn’t more than half an inch taller than I but her caramel heels added an inch to that.

“I like strong men,” she said.

“Why? So they can protect you?”

“I like to watch them come.”

A woman standing in front of us turned slightly, cocking her ear in our direction.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Underneath, on top, or looking over his belly button,” she said. “Strong men who know their strength give it up because they don’t have to pretend.”

The woman in front of us on line touched the shoulder of the guy she was with. They were both white and in their twenties. She leaned over to whisper something and he turned to look.

“Is that offer in lieu of my fee?” I asked.

“Next!” the cab controller shouted. He might have said it more than once.

The nosy couple realized that he was calling to them and reluctantly returned to their lives.

“I’m staying at the Hotel Brown in the East Sixties,” she said.

“I know the place.”

“I should have the money in the next hour or so.”

I took out a business card and handed it to her.

“Call me when you’re ready to pay up,” I said, and she smiled.

“I guess you are as tough as you think,” she said.

“Next!”