When the Thrill Is Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

he asked.
    “Just took on a new client.”
    “Still on the up-and-up?”
    “More like the up-and-down,” I said, “but, yeah, I’m trying to keep it legal.”
    “Really? It has been mentioned that you have developed a relationship with a man named Hush.”
    “What is it you want, Mr. Vartan?”
    “You used to call me Uncle.”
    I shrugged.
    Vartan waited a moment, to see if I’d show some heart—but he knew better.
    “I came here to ask you to find a man for me,” he said. “A man named William Williams, a former associate.”
    “Why me?”
    “New York was his last address, and you’re known to me.”
    I took a moment to pretend to consider his request. Then I said, “I will not, under any circumstances, work for you, Mr. Vartan. Not for any amount of money.”
    “I wasn’t intending to pay you,” he said. “I thought that you would do it as a favor for an old friend of the family.”
    “No reason for us to mince words here,” I said. “I’m out of the life, and that means I won’t go back even if someone as dangerous and powerful as you tries to make me.”
    Vartan sat back so comfortably you might have thought he was at home in his den, sitting in his favorite chair. He held his hands palms up and raised his eyebrows.
    “I respect your decision, Lenny,” he said, using a nickname that only he dared use. “But this request has nothing to do with my business or anything illegal that I am aware of. This man is an old friend from my youth. I promised someone that I’d find him—for friendship, not business.”
    I had never known Vartan to out-and-out lie. His trade was solving problems, not deception.
    “And if you do me this service I will be in your debt,” he added.
    I’d burned quite a few bridges in the past few months. A friend of Vartan’s stature would certainly come in handy.
    “This doesn’t have anything to do with your business?” I said.
    “Nothing.”
    “There’s no crime, no vengeance involved?”
    “Correct.”
    “Your word?”
    “If you need it, it’s yours.”
    “I’ll think about it and call you tomorrow. Just give me a number.”
    “I’ll call you.”
    I gave him as hard a stare as a gnat can give a lion and then nodded, accepting his terms.
    “Have you been up to your mother’s grave lately?” he asked.
    “Why?”
    “It’s just a question, Lenny.”
    “There’s questions I could ask you, too, Uncle Harry,” I said. “Questions just as tough.”
    Instead of continuing, the Diplomat stood up and went to the door.
    “I can see myself out,” he said.
    That was fine by me.

6
    THE NUMBER 1 TRAIN at rush hour is a fast-moving mob. Commuting workers and others are piled on top of each other, using anything they can to escape the feeling of melee. Young people form into circles and talk loudly enough to drown out the shrieking of steel on steel. Families huddle, blue-collar workers nap, and almost everybody else is plugged into loud music, last night’s missed TV show, or any game from sudoku to Grand Theft Auto . There are readers, too, concentrating on sensational magazines, nineteenth-century novels, and comic books.
    I usually gravitate toward the end of the platform—the last car is most often the least populous. But I don’t get distracted. I like watching people, seeing how they turn inward and turn away when finding themselves in a throng. You’d think that anyone who’d decided to live in a city like New York, to travel by underground train, would revel in the closely packed company of others—but no.
    One day it came to me that the isolation and alienation of rush hour is like so many marriages I’ve investigated—a lifetime spent together in the same bed and still managing to keep separate and remote.
    In the majority of my marital cases, I got the definite impression that I knew more about the private lives of the couple than either of them did.
    Those three monkeys, my father used to say, Hear No, See No, Speak No . . . Just drop the