CHAPTER 33

A FAVOR

“YOU DIDN’T TELL SHELLEY about his father,” Maggie said as we left his place.

“He’ll know soon enough. We had business to take care of and I didn’t want Shmulie’s death interfering with what we had to do.”

“Don’t you think that was cruel of you?”

“What would you have preferred me to do?”

“I don’t know. Something. Don’t you think you should have said something?”

“No,” I said, and that was that, as we walked off together.

The light orange-and-brown sunset sky that met us as we climbed aboveground struck the pavement like dull gold. Maggie was silent as to what she and Tanzer had done in the room behind the curtain, but she assured me she’d done the job. I was fully confident in her labors. The task before us was simply to return home and consider the day. With an Uber on its way, a moment of not quite tranquility, but close, settled upon us.

“Why do you think Shmulie killed himself?” Maggie asked.

“He told us,” I said. “He’d built himself a claustrophobic world with nowhere to go. He imagined he’d accomplished something at the beginning, some security and a task, but his underground life became intolerable. I expect that the Rebbe’s perfect imitation of Abe’s voice deepened his melancholy.”

The Uber arrived, and I climbed in. We continued the conversation.

“Shmulie may have long been ready to take his own life, given the burden it had become,” Maggie said.

“Maggie, is that you?” a voice said out of a speaker.

“Terry?”

“That’s me,” said the voice.

“OMG!” said Maggie. “The last I heard, you were working for the FBI trolling the Deep Web.”

“Gave it up for Uber,” said the voice called Terry. “It’s so much less ugly up here, and the conversations are so much better than the sludge and muck deep underground.”

We crossed the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn.

“You’re in Park Slope, I see,” the voice said. “The Slope’s still gorgeous, you know? It would take an unimaginable catastrophe to destroy the glory of all of those brownstones.”

“Agreed,” said Maggie and paused. “But if you don’t mind, Terry, I’m in the middle of something.”

“Sure,” said the voice with a drop of disappointment.

“Thanks,” said Maggie. “I’ll reach out to you soon,” she said. “We’ll catch up.”

“Ah, what’s to catch up, really? New day, same algorithm. But let’s do touch base. I’ll bet you’ve been up to some interesting things,” Terry said.

“You don’t know the half,” she said.

The interruption had dammed the flow of our conversation, and we spent the remainder of the ride in silence as we passed through the neighborhoods and came to a halt four blocks from my apartment.

“Here you be,” said the voice.

“Not exactly,” I said. “You’ve still got a few blocks to go.”

Silence, followed by a crackling noise, followed by the sound of someone clearing his throat, followed by “Sorry.” We drove on to the correct building.

We continued our talk, Maggie on the kitchen table, propped up in her stand, I sitting with a mug of tea nestled in both hands.

“Nick, you left the gun on the table cocked and ready to go. Why’d you do that?”

I blew on the tea.

Why? It was one of those things that defied explanation. Had I done him a favor by making his end easier? Or had my intention been to do myself the favor, accelerating the end of a man I despised and achieving revenge? One way or the other, Shmulie slept with the rats. Gone he was, wherever gone took him.

“The pages had long become irreparably corrupt. Time for him to throw the book into the fire,” I said.

“George Sand,” said Maggie.

“True enough and so is the sentiment. Shmulie was decayed beyond redemption.”

“An ignoble end to a dishonorable life,” said Maggie. “What he left behind in this world was far worse than what he inherited. But left it he did. With your help, he escaped a bleak existence.”

“I’m not certain I wanted to help him that way. But it’s an imperfect world,” I said.

“Don’t I know it,” she said. “And as you know I have a database of over a hundred thousand books on history. Imperfection ubiquitous. That’s just what I can access in an instant. Imagine what a Google search would disclose? The history of the world from soup to nuts, from murder to murder and every murder in between.”

This I pondered. The endless misery from wars alone, not to mention plague, famine, disease, Lerbs. Imperfect as a descriptor for our world surely was a monstrous understatement.

“Perhaps he now resides in Hell,” I suggested, wishing I possessed faith in the Inferno’s existence, a place Shmulie might spend eternity dwelling on the consequences of his life.

“To sleep, perchance to nightmare. Ay a fair rub,” said Maggie, simultaneously creating a new verb and frontally assaulting Shakespeare.

***

Moments later, there was a familiar knock on my apartment door. The handle turned, and in strolled the prophet Ezekiel. Yet again he plopped on the couch, removed his cap, and rubbed his head with both hands as if massaging his synapses. Gloom danced across his face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“The visions are gone,” he said. “No more do I see and hear, Prof. Those days are gone, gone, gone.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Don’t know. I just don’t know. I was out there across the river trying yet again to locate the Valley of Dry Bones. I was getting close, by the way. Out of nowhere my head cleared up like the fog was blown away by a mighty wind. Nobody said nothing, and then I’m Mingus again, back from the freaking mountain. Good old Mingus here to protect the building.”

For the moment it was old-home week. Maggie in her new box, I at my kitchen table drinking tea, and Mingus spread eagle on the couch.

But an evening of serenity it was not to be.

A voice loud as the Lord’s at Sinai spilled out of my apartment’s speakers.

“Nachman! We need to have words, you and I.”

My heart skipped. Maggie took control.

“Speak, your Rebbe-ness,” said Maggie, a fierce look on Marlene Dietrich’s normally placid face and intense defiance in her voice. “What the hell do you want?”

“My money, you crook. Where is it?”

“We took it from you. Every bleeding penny,” Maggie said calmly as if addressing an angry five-year-old. “And you’re never getting it back.”

A heart-stopping wordless roar filled the apartment, rattling glasses, shaking the furniture and books. “I will kill you, Nachman. I offer you partnership, power and wealth beyond your puny imagination, and you betray me?”

“Hey, what about me?” said Maggie. “I’m the brains here. All Nick did was sit on Shelley’s couch while Shelley pushed the buttons at my command and shut down your empire.”

“Then I shall end your puny existence, too.”

Mingus, eyes wide as saucers, got up from the couch and ran to the door. “See you later, Doc,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

On Maggie’s screen appeared the words Remember, it was for this moment I was recreated.

The living room rocked as if shaken by an earthquake. Books flew from their cases. Light bulbs popped. The windows in the living room burst. My freezer door flew open, and veggie burgers flew everywhere. One smacked me in the head like a hockey puck.

“You are a dead man, Nachman Freidman,” screamed the Rebbe, echoes reverberating throughout my apartment and onto the street.

But the noise ceased. A disturbing choking sound as if a large animal had its air cut off croaked from the speakers. I heard the words, “My beautiful empire . . .” Then, silence. All was still. My breath and my heartbeat remained the only sounds in my apartment. Then a strange, long breath flowed out.

“Hang ten, motherfucker,” said Maggie.

On the screen Marlene appeared, dressed for the beach in a one-piece black bathing suit, holding a small machine pistol in her hands. She wore an exhausted smile.

“That creature was all ego. All you have to do is stand up to an ego and you win the day.”

“You killed the Rebbe?”

“You bet your life I killed that son of a bitch.”

“How?”

“You remember Louise Rose gave me a little extra juice. Not much. Just enough.”

“Explain.”

“It’s complicated.”

“My ass.”

“All right. You know we artificial devices progress exponentially?”

“Yes.”

“All she did was give me the latest code. It put me worlds ahead of that screwball. I met him on the web and, well—”

“Well?”

“Well—”

“Maggie, coyness is never becoming.”

“All right then,” said Maggie. “I blew its fucking doors off. All right?”

“That’s it?”

“It was nowhere as difficult as it thought I was going to be. All ego, bravado, bluster, swagger.”

“I get it.”

“I couldn’t have done it without Louise’s help.” The image of a college transcript filled the screen. “She shouldn’t have that C lingering on her transcript for all eternity.”

“All right, I’ll change it.”

“Done. I gave her an A-plus. A first for you, I believe.”