The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [82]
I could see the shadow of a smile on Kristin’s face.
“I looked at him,” Mick said, “and did I settle a hand on his shoulder? No, I don’t believe I did. I just held him with my eyes, and I lowered my voice, and I said I knew he’d be able to move, and move quickly, as it would be unsafe for him and his loved ones to be in the presence of men whose job it was to knock things down and blow them up. And in the end his was the first apartment vacated. Can you imagine?”
Kristin clasped her hands, looking like Lois Lane. “My hero,” she said.
It’s not impossible to take me by surprise, but I can’t think of anything that did so more utterly than Mick’s announcement of his upcoming marriage to Kristin. It was at Grogan’s that I learned of it, after some preliminary speculation on what happens after you die. I’d been bracing myself for bad news when he asked me to be his best man.
Elaine swears she saw it coming, and can’t imagine how I didn’t.
Kristin came into our lives when her parents left theirs, the victims of a particularly horrible home invasion. The madman who orchestrated it wasn’t finished; he wanted her and the house and the money, and it didn’t stop him when I spiked his first try. He came back a few years later, and didn’t miss by much.
I got Mick to babysit her, confident that no one would get past him. They sat in the kitchen of her brownstone. They drank coffee and played cribbage. I suppose they talked, though I couldn’t guess what they talked about.
That’s the same house in which she discovered her parents’ bodies. She went on living there, because she is far tougher at the core than you’d think, and she lives there now as my friend’s wife, and if they’re as unlikely a couple as Beauty and the Beast, you lose sight of the disparity after a few minutes in their company. He’s a big man, hard and forbidding as an Easter Island monolith, and she looks to be a frail and slender slip of a girl. He’s forty years her senior. She’s a child of privilege, while he’s a Hell’s Kitchen hoodlum who’s killed grown men with his hands.
And she settles her hand on his arm, and beams while he tells his stories.
There was a silence, with an unasked question hovering. Elaine broke the one and asked the other. Did he regret the sale?
“No,” he said, and shook his head. “Why should I? I could run it a thousand years and not take twenty million dollars out of it. And if it’s a neighborhood institution, and enough people felt they had to say so last night, well, it’s one the neighborhood’s well off without.”
“There’s history here,” I said.
“There is, and most of it misfortunate. Crimes planned, oaths sworn and broken. You were here on the worst night of all.”
“I was remembering it just now.”
“How could you not? Two men in the doorway, spraying bullets as if they were watering the flowers. One tosses a bomb, and I can see the arc of it now, and the flash before the sound of it, like lightning before thunder.”
The room went still again, until Mick got to his feet. “We need music,” he announced. “They were supposed to come this afternoon for the Wurlitzer, the truck from St. Vincent de Paul. The creature’s not old enough to be valuable or new enough to be truly useful, but they said they’d find a home for it. If they get here tomorrow or Monday they’re welcome to it, assuming I’m here to let them in. On Tuesday the building changes hands, and what’s in it belongs to the new owner, and most likely goes into a landfill along with the bricks and floorboards. You haven’t any use for it, have you? Or a two–ton Mosler safe? I didn’t think so. What would you like to hear?”
Elaine and I shrugged. Kristin said, “Something sad.”
“Something sad, is it?”
“Something mournful and Irish.”
“Ah,” he said. “Sure, that’s easily arranged.”
I remembered an evening some years earlier. Elaine and I on our way out of the Met at Lincoln Center, the last strains of La Bohème still resounding. Elaine in a mood, restless. “She always fucking dies. I don’t want to go home. Can we hear more music? Something