The Man Who Came Uptown
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-47982-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Man Who Came Uptown». Краткое содержание книги:
Most of the men had put the reading guide she had prepared under their chairs. Each man held a copy of the book, the twenty-third printing of a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback, in his hands. She had found copies in passable condition on the internet for next to nothing, all with the classic Ron Lesser cover art showing a woman with big hair wearing leopard-skin capri pants and high heels, her bare back exposed. Anna’s father, recently diagnosed with colon cancer, had collected the McGee paperbacks. There always seemed to be one on his nightstand when she was growing up. So picking this book for the club had been an emotional choice as well as a literary one.
After a prayer, led by one of the more religious members of the group, the discussion commenced.
“What did you all think of the lead character, Travis McGee?” said Anna.
“That’s a bad white boy right there,” said a man named Sam, a serial parole violator with two clown patches of gray hair flanking a bald head. Anna never knew what Sam did to keep getting locked up, but it couldn’t have been too egregious. He had a gentle manner.
“He’s got no nine-to-five job,” said Russell, an intelligent longtime heroin addict who dealt small quantities to pay for his habit. “He only works when he runs out of money. He’s tall, strong, and good-looking. He can go with his hands. He drinks but he’s not a drunk. He scores with all kinds of women. Got no commitments. No mortgage, no family. Shoot, the man lives on a houseboat. You don’t get no freer than that.”
“McGee is the man that many men would like to be,” said Anna. “He’s wish fulfillment in the flesh. That’s one of the reasons the series was so popular.”
“This reminded me of a Western movie,” said a repeat offender named Randolph, a film freak who often spoke nostalgically about life in the 1970s, the decade, apparently, when he’d had the most fun. He was sixty years old, very tall, light-skinned with freckles, still wore his hair in a blowout, and had a comically long nose. Some of the men called him Big Bird.
“How so, Randolph?” said Anna.
“McGee is like John Wayne or some shit. You know that movie The Searchers? Ethan Edwards. That’s McGee right there. He’s a protector, but he don’t fit into society nohow.”
“He’s more like a knight,” said Russell, putting on his reading glasses and opening his book. “Look here, I marked it. Page twenty-nine. McGee talks about himself getting on his white steed, knocking the rust off his armor, and tilting a crooked old lance.”
“There you go,” said Sam. “The lance is crooked. That means Travis knows he’s not straight.”
“You could say he’s a tarnished angel,” said Anna. “What about the villain in the book, Junior Allen?”
The mention of Allen, the sociopathic predator of the novel, caused the group to stir.
“That’s a wrong motherfucker right there,” said a man. “Excuse me, Anna.”
“McGee calls Junior a goat-god,” said Russell. “A satyr.”
“But isn’t Junior similar, in a way, to McGee?” said Anna. “I’m talking about in their relations with women. Sure, Junior uses women for sport, but McGee also sleeps with many women he doesn’t love.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that. A man got needs.”
“Junior is like McGee if McGee was a bad person for real,” said Russell.
“Junior is McGee’s id,” said Anna. “His dark side.”
“That’s why McGee got to kill him,” said Russell, taking off his glasses and folding his hands in his lap.
“Why does he have to?” said Anna.
“So he can destroy that dark side of his self.”
The men quietly considered that. Some of them nodded their heads.
“Someone should make a movie of this book,” said a man.
“There was two Travis McGee movies,” said Randolph.
“Now Randolph gonna school us about cinema,” said Russell.
“One of ’em was a TV movie with a cowboy actor,” said Randolph. “That don’t even count. But there was one called Darker than Amber, with Rod Taylor as McGee? Taylor was macho, boy, he played the shit out of that role. There was like a ten-minute hand-to-hand fight in the end between him and William Smith, big muscle-bound cat who usually played bikers. It looked like the two of them were really going at it. The director was the same guy who did Enter the Dragon.”
“Man, nobody ask you to talk about Bruce Lee. This is a book club, not a movie club.”
“Just sayin,” said Randolph. “Darker than Amber was tight. I saw it at the Booker T. back in the day.”
“We ain’t back in the motherfuckin day, Big Bird. So you can just step out of your time machine.”
Laughter rippled through the group. Some of the men touched fists.
“Did John MacDonald make much money?” said a man.
The conversation and debate grew heated and lively. When it was time to end the session, many of the men wanted to stay.
“That was a good book,” said Sam.
“Thank you, Miss Anna,” said Russell.
“It was my pleasure,” she said.
In the weeks that followed the murder of Phil Ornazian, Thaddeus Ward kept a low profile. He attended the funeral but did not speak to Ornazian’s widow, Sydney, who never once looked his way. Ornazian’s sons were not there. His wife, apparently, had spared them the sight of their father’s casket being lowered into the ground.
Ward checked into his business, Ward Bonds, infrequently. In his absence, he had put Genesis, the smart ex — National Guardswoman, in charge. She was a natural manager and was good with the clientele.
At home, he drew the curtains, placed loaded guns in various rooms, and kept his shotgun by his bed. He told his daughter not to visit, that he would come see her and his grandchildren when the opportunity arose. If the killers were going to come for him, he would be ready, but he would be ready alone.
They didn’t come.
Restless, he drove into Northwest one day and found the garage in the alley near Kansas Avenue where Ornazian had gotten his hacks. There he met Berhanu, an Ethiopian with curly black hair, in one of the bays. It had come to Ward that the cameras on the brothel’s street had recorded the Impala SS they had used in the robbery.
The Impala was not here, but there were three high-horse imports in the garage. After introducing himself, Ward asked Berhanu, known by many in this part of the city as an off-the-books renter of cars, if anyone had come to him asking about the renter of the SS. Berhanu told him that a Spanish man with a clean-shaven face had done just that, but he added that he had not given the man any information. Ward believed him.
“Anybody work here with you?” said Ward.
“I had a man,” said Berhanu. “A mechanic named Donnie. But he’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“He didn’t show up for work one day and never returned. I left messages, but...” Berhanu shrugged. “Donnie was a drunk. Good with tools, but unreliable.”
Ward considered this. In his heart he knew that it was Gustav who had ordered the hit on Ornazian. It fit that the mechanic had given up the plate numbers on Ornazian’s Ford in exchange for a payoff. It would be simple to locate the Ornazian residence and follow Phil from there. They’d executed the classic trap at the intersection of Park and Sherman. Cesar, most likely, had wielded the shotgun that ended Phil’s life.
Nos encontraremos otra vez.
We will meet another time.
It was the last thing Cesar had said to them the night they’d bound him to a chair. He’d made good on his promise.