The Long Fall

“A MAN’S BOOKCASE will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him,” my father had told me more than once. “A business-man has business books and a dreamer has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”

I don’t know where my father got all that stuff. He was raised just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, born to parents who could neither read nor write. He said that he became a revolutionary at the age of thirteen when his parents were being evicted from their sharecropper’s hovel and one of the white marshals spit on his mother. Soon after that he changed his name from Clarence to Tolstoy.

For all his humble beginnings my father was smart. But I think that even he would have been amazed at what Fell’s library had to say.

There were volumes in Greek and Spanish, English and French; old books of poetry shoved up right next to modern popular novels. Many had been shelved upside down and they covered every obscure subject under the sun. There was a Chinese tome that, from the illustrations, I assumed was about sewing machine repair. There were other manuals and textbooks along with sultry potboilers and children’s fairy tales.

In the end I “">Iultdecided that Fell must be functionally illiterate, though he loved the idea of reading and wanted to be seen as smart. That’s why there was no casework in his files, no computer, not one sentence anywhere written by his hand. I guess he knew his numbers well enough to write them down along with codes and simple names that he probably transcribed or worked out phonetically.

I’d have to come after Fell in a more straightforward fashion.

I would either wait in my car outside or stay where I was, seated behind his desk, to greet him when he showed up in the morning.

He wouldn’t want to call the police any more than I did. The problem was that he might be armed and shoot me where I sat. It was always better to come up behind your enemy. My father never told me that, but I learned it early.

Deciding on discretion over comfort, I went to the toilet to relieve myself before going back to the red SUV. I could sleep in the backseat and wake up with the sun. It had been a while since I had done anything like that.

Standing at the high commode, I sniffed at a sour tickle way back in my nasal passage.

I knew that tickle.

The man who had introduced himself to me as Ambrose Thurman was crushed into the bottom of the deep iron tub, eyes wide and lips drawn back over the small rounded teeth. The fingers of his left hand had all been broken—probably by a single blow. I couldn’t tell if he died from strangulation or the broken neck, but there was no question that he had died violently. He was wearing a dark-green suit with a checkered black-and-red vest. His socks bore holes at the big toe of either foot. I considered searching him but thought better of it.

I gazed into his face for a good long time before deciding he had nothing to say.

JIMMY WAS STILL on his stool when I got back to the Gray Wolf a few minutes before two. I returned the screwdriver and he set the elevator to take me to the fourth floor of the landlocked cruise ship.

I didn’t sleep that night, knowing for certain there’d be plenty time enough for rest when I was dead.

Ê€„

18

I got off on the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building four minutes past eight o’clock the next morning. The leftover nervousness from the flight was nothing compared to the growing possibility of spending a couple of decades behind bars. Men were dying and all I had gotten out of it was a paltry wad of cash.

I found the seven locks that secured the outer office undone and the door ajar. I hovered in the hall a full thirty seconds, wondering if I should turn around and run to Brazil. I had one offshore account that was inviolable, and Twill could secret himself, and his mother if she wanted to come, down to Mexico for a rendezvous . . .

It was the thought of Twill that anchored me that morning. I had to stay around long enough to save him from his own nature.

The locks weren’t broken so I pushed the door and walked in quickly.

Carson Kitteridge stood up from one of the golden chairs usually inhabited by phantoms visiting my non-existent secretary.

“Lieutenant,” I said.

The cop smiled but there was no mirth in his eye.

In his late forties, Kitteridge was short and balding, slim and very white—pale. His eyes were gray, as was his suit and machine-washable tie.

“LT,” he replied.

We’d known each other nearly twenty years and not once had we shaken hands.

“How can I help you?” I said, refusing to ask how he got in.

“Just stopping by.”

“What? You were investigating some kinda buggery on the fifty-fifth floor and said, ‘Hey, why don’t I drop in on old Leonid?’” By this time I was entering the combination to my inner door.