I had not been to the club before, but I knew of it.
“Looking for Mel?” asked a lovely blond black young woman standing behind the cast-iron podium at the bottom of the stairs. She wore a little black dress, black hose, and a microchain silver necklace that had a red stone as its jewel.
“Yes, I am.”
She took me through a doorway behind the podium, down a slender hallway, to another flight of stairs that led to another large room with fewer occupants.
“At the opposite wall,” she said.
I saw Melquarth Frost waving at me from the place the hostess indicated. I couldn’t help feeling that I was actually about to make a deal with the devil.
He stood up when I approached the table. I got the impression that this was a show of great deference. We shook hands. His powerful paw felt like a winter glove filled with concrete.
“Mr. Frost.”
“King—I got your text. Did they let you in like I said?”
“They sure did.”
We sat and appreciated each other a moment. He wore a lemon-colored suit that was loose but hung well. The shirt was lapis replete with errant silver and golden threads weaving through. I wore a felt-lined brown trench coat, black trousers, and black leather shoes with rubber soles.
I had thirteen years on the force, six of those as a detective, and Frost was the most dangerous criminal I had ever come across. Our few meetings had convinced me that he felt in my debt, though we had never discussed this obligation after his first visit to my office.
We might have been about to start speaking, when a mid-height, slump-shouldered man wearing a white jacket and black pants walked up to the small round table.
“Mel,” the man said in a voice that was hard and clear.
“Ork.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Nobody for you to worry about.”
“A guy up at the bar told me that he looks like a cop he used to know.”
“Go back to him,” Mel said, “and say that he should mind his own business.”
Mel and Ork peered at each other maybe a quarter of a minute. The latter’s nostrils flared, then he walked away.
“Friendly place,” I commented.
“Crooks are a skittish lot,” Mel countered.
“I thought you gave all that up.”
“I just like the atmosphere. Sometimes you get the need to talk to people who have the right language behind their eyes.”
I nodded.
“What can I do for you, King?”
“Tell me why you came to my office that day,” I said simply.
“I told you already.”
“Maybe pad it with some details.”
“Why?”
“Because I might want to ask you for something and you’re named after Satan.”
Melquarth Frost grinned.
“I saw a red bird in Prospect Park two days before you busted me,” he said.
“A red bird.”
“Pure scarlet,” he assented with a vigorous nod. “At first it was just a flash up in the trees, in between the leaves. But then it landed on a branch maybe forty feet away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I found myself hoping that it would get closer so I could get a better look. I was sitting on a park bench getting my head together for the job. The thing took wing and landed on the lawn in front’a me. It was big, almost the size of a crow, and there was a single black feather on the crown of its head.”
There was what I can only call a beatific look on the ex–heist man’s face.
“And?” I said.
“He looked at me and I knew that that meant something. Here some completely wild animal comes right up to you and looks you in the eye. That means something.”
He had me.
“What?” I asked.
“I wasn’t sure about the exact message, but a bird means freedom and the color red means pay attention. And I thought that a bird like that, a bird that stood out like a flare in the night, was something like me.
“And then, when the prosecutor asked you to say something about me that would throw me under the bus, you refused. You were the better man when I was running and again when I was helpless.
“Don’t get me wrong. I could have done my time. I wasn’t afraid, but you weren’t either. You were like that red bird in the tree and then you came down. That was the sign—as clear as the nose on Ork’s ugly face.
“I was committed to one more job and, like I told you, my partner shot me in the back. That right there was the final straw—the business was finished with me.”
I was convinced that Mel was crazy. But his psychopath’s vision of the world seemed cohesive and certain; something I could trust to be what it was.
“I’m involved in a couple of cases,” I said after an appreciative pause. “I’m gonna need some help and I thought maybe I could hire you. I got a small budget and could hire a man. It’s not heist money, but you’re not a heist man anymore.”
“You got it.”
“Don’t you wanna hear what it is?”
“Sure. You got to tell me, but, Mr. Oliver, if that red bird asked me to follow him I would have said yes too.”
“How much will you charge?”
“A dollar now and a dollar when it’s through.”
I took a dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to him.
“You want to take a walk with me?” I asked Melquarth Frost.
He put the dollar in his breast pocket and stood.
I followed him up the stairs and out into a fate filled with madmen and red birds, nameless cops and women who fooled you again and again.
14.
Walking across from the East Village to the West was a pivotal, even a transitional journey in my life.
My father was a criminal and therefore I had become a cop. I was framed and threatened and so stopped being official and did the work as a private dick. Every step I had taken was an equal and opposite reaction to my father—you might say that it had nothing to do with free will at all.
But me walking down those chilly autumn streets with a man so evil that no crime deterred him meant that I had taken the first steps on a different path, a path that was mine and mine alone.
“I know there’s no way for me to make up for what I was,” Mel was saying as we made our way north on Hudson. The dark brick of the old buildings imparted their gloom onto his lecture and our destination. “I mean, I did it all and it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe if I felt it, I would want to make amends…”
He kept talking, but I wasn’t listening too closely. I knew somewhere that this was new for him too, that he wasn’t the kind of guy who told you anything unless it was either absolutely necessary or a lie. Melquarth, maybe for the first time, was thinking out loud, while I remembered my cell in solitary and how my enemies had broken me, made me cower like a dog.
“There it is,” I said after six long blocks.
The Liberté Café was on the east side of Hudson, having big windows and outside tables that only a few people used. It was mainly an overpriced pastry shop that made complex coffees and little sandwiches that pretended to be French.
“Can I help you?” a young caramel-colored woman asked. She had big freckles flanking her broad nose and a space between her front teeth.
“How about that table there?” I suggested.
“Sure. I’ll get Juan to bring your menus.”
I could see that Mel would have preferred a table tucked away behind the counter, but I knew that such seating would make us look suspicious.
Juan was a smallish bronze-skinned man with a debonair mustache and eyes that had somewhere else to be.
“I’ll have the prosciutto on a baguette and a green tea latte,” I told the young man when he asked the floor for my order.
“Coffee, black, with some bread,” Mel said.
When Juan went away Mel asked, “So what do you want with this guy?” referring to Stuart Braun.
“Have you ever met him?”
“No, but I knew a dude in Q that Braun got out from under a murder one charge.”
“Braun was in California?”
“No. But the guy had killed somebody in New York and then another man in Sacramento. California extradited and convicted him after Braun did his magic out here.”
“I don’t want to say why I’m looking into him quite yet,” I said.
“It’s your dollar.”