The Long Fall

“I don’t mean to rush you,” he said after maybe thirty seconds of my silent second thoughts, “but the attaché to the newly elected president of Russia is due to show up in nine minutes.”

He wasn’t bragging so much as showing me my place in the scheme of things.

“I need a pass to get into Larchmont State Prison, to get an hour alone with an inmate named William Nilson. His nickname is Toolie. And . . . ” I hesitated again. My old life was teeming around my ears, a swarm of killer bees casting a shadow and humming a dirge. “. . . and I want to know the whereabouts of a guy, a man, an accountant named A Mann.”

“Are you sure you want to find this man?”

“Yeah. Why? You know something?”

“You just seem a little doubtful.”

“Life is uncertain, isn’t it, Mr. Rinaldo?”

That got me a three-second smile.

“His first name?”

“The vowel.”

He reached under his desk and picked away at something. It took all of a minute. Then he stood up.

That was the drill. I stood up, too. I was supposed to leave then. As with Harris Vartan, it was important in Rinaldo’s ether that the people he dealt with picked up on the subtle nuances of his gestures. That’s why I was surprised when a quizzical expression crossed his face.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just thinking,” he said, sounding almost human.

“ ’Bout what?”

<û="1mandiv height="1em" width="1em" align="justify">“You and Christian are the only two black men, American-born black men, that have ever been in this office. Do you find that strange?”

“Only thing strange is that you realize it.”

He didn’t offer a hand and neither did I. I took the couple of dozen steps back the way I’d come and exited that particular conduit to hell.

Ê€„

31

By the time I’d reached Christian’s cell he had nearly everything I needed. Alphonse must have had a computer under his desk that he used to communicate with his living data engine. Christian was just finishing scribbling down A Mann’s pertinent information on the back of a pizza-delivery slip. These included a street address and a website that would be ready later that day.

“And the prison?” I asked after reading the address and dot-com-to-be.

“All you have to do is show up and tell them who you’re there to see.”

“Should I give them a name?” I asked. “A reference or something?”

His sneer was a thing to behold.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” And I turned toward the door.

Christian did not wish me a good day.

THREE HOURS LATER I was out near Coney Island sitting in my green-and-white 1957 Pontiac across the street and down the block from a small wooden cottage on Murray Lane. I’d been there for twenty minutes, but that was okay by me. I liked it when I got time alone in my car, playing songs from my youth. I listened to everything from Gordon Lightfoot to B. B. King. Thanks to MP3 technology I could carry around my entire four-thousand-album collection in my shirt pocket.

I’d hired Twill to copy the collection two summers before, telling him I’d give him two dollars for every hour of music he recorded. That way I figured to keep him out of trouble when he wasn’t in school, while maybe getting a thousand or so records transposed in the process.

Three weeks after I hired him he came to me with the MP3 player, saying, “Here you go, Pops.”

I hadn’t seen him doing a thing. He was out day and night the whole time but there my records were, all of them, cross-referenced by genre, album, artist, and song name. He’d copied nearly forty thousand cuts in just over twenty-one days.

When I asked him how he did it he told me that he had a friend with five MP3-friendly turntables complete with mechanical stalks that could hold up to eight albums at a time.

“I just promised him two thousand to do the collection in three weeks,” Twill said, smiling.<þdiv/font>

It was a good deal, seeing that I owed my son six thousand.

Not having the cash on hand, I paid off his friend in installments over the summer and got Twill to agree to my starting a college account for him. I’m still depositing money on the first of each month, and listening to my favorite songs every day.

“Suppose I don’t want to go to college?” he argued when I first brought up the notion.

“You need to go,” I told him. “After that you could go into business and become a billionaire.”

“Not interested,” he replied, holding up a lazy hand intended to short-circuit the capitalist curse.

“Not now,” I said with fatherly assurance.

“Not never, Pops. Money makes people weak and stupid. And you know when you’re rich nobody ever likes you for you but for what you’re worth. I’d rather just make enough to do what I want and keep the electricity on.”

He was fourteen years old at the time. I promised him that if he didn’t want to go to college by the time he was twenty he could have whatever money was in the account.

“FAT MAN” BY Jethro Tull was playing on the Bose speakers I’d installed in the backseat. Twill wasn’t my son by blood but I would save him from himself. He deserved a better life, despite his intelligence and predilections.