But as things stood I had misgivings.
On the one hand Roger sounded scared, on the other the rent was due and there were no new jobs on the horizon. Aura liked me, maybe she even loved me, but she was going to do her job. I’d be on the street by the end of the month if I didn’t pay the landlord’s fee.
“Money is a chain that the worker willingly wraps around his own neck,” my father had said many a time. “It chokes him and weighs him down until finally, one day, he would kill his own brother for just a few minutes’ relief.”
Maybe if my father, Tolstoy McGill, hadn’t gone off to South America to fight the fascists or the capitalists or whoever, maybe if he’d come back and been a parent to me, I would have tried to live by the vision of his perfect world. Maybe if my mother, once she knew the love of her life was never coming back, hadn’t gone to her bed and lay there until the doctors came and took her off to the hospital to die, maybe then I would have taken a different path.
But as it was I had to make my own way in a world of chains and choking, imperfect choices and the fools who made them.
“HELLO?” AMBROSE THURMAN said, answering his phone on the first ring.
“I got all four names.”
“What are they?”
“You want ’em over the phone?”
“Yes, indeed. Time is of the essence.”
“You see, you and me got something in common there, Mr. Thurman.”
“What’s that, Mr. McGill?”
“I want my money.”
“I can’t give you your, your remuneration on the phone.” He used the word as if trying to learn it, to integrate it into his vocabulary.
“And so I can’t give you what I got.”
“I can send it to you via overnight mail.”
“I have a better idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Why don’t you come down here this evening and we’ll trade information and money across a table, face-to-face.”
I wasn’t my father or my mother.