Page 41
“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.”
I was beginning to like my satanic sidekick.
“So what’s your story, Mel? I mean the real deal.”
He looked at me. His eyes were truly dead, but regardless of that there was gratitude in his stare.
“Prison psychiatrist says that I have borderline personality disorder with intermittent psychotic breaks that both relieve the pressure of unconscious guilt and make me dangerous.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“Don’t it? I asked the woman, if I was that far gone why was I in prison and not in some mental facility?”
“What did she say?” I asked, looking up to see a trio of unlikely customers walk through the glass door. The big men all wore jeans, cotton sports jackets, and patterned shirts of various styles.
“That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil,” Mel said, answering my question. “She said in the modern world a man who beats his own head against the wall is crazy but the guy slams somebody else’s head is criminal.”
“Three guys walked in,” I said.
“I see ’em in the mirror.”
They were talking to the sweet-skinned freckled girl.
“The fat one in the light jacket is a guy named Porker,” Mel added. “I don’t think he knows me. I was supposed to kill him this one time, but his girlfriend decided that she felt sorry for his wife and gave me my fifty percent kill fee.”
