She shook her head once. That was her statement of underlying disapproval. She nodded twice. That was her assent to my caution. I knew that would be that.
LaBelle was my rock.
The “eligibility assessment” had been completely transparent. I assumed it was ongoing, but I never noticed a thing. None of the people who typically act as the pillars that support the temples of the wealthy—my accountant, my attorney, my bankers, my financial advisors, my business partners—ever called me late at night to clue me in that someone was checking up on me or my affairs.
Jimmy Lee never pulled me aside and asked me how things were going in New York.
The Death Angels were as discreet as advertised.
The second time that my private mobile phone rang—okay, it actually vibrated—the caller was inviting me to make a return visit to New York City. The caller was a woman.
The voice sounded familiar. I asked, “With whom am I speaking?”
My question caused the woman to stumble for a split second, but not to fall. She continued to spell out the details of the “invitation.” I tried small talk, and I even made an allusion to the Town Car heading downtown on Park Avenue. My flirtations were rebuffed, or more correctly, ignored. The call was all business.
Of course I wondered whether I’d been speaking with the woman with the traveling fingers, the one from the backseat of the Town Car.
Mary flew me to New York the night before the meeting. The copilot that day was a temp named Andre who’d flown with us before, but wasn’t interested in our gig on a permanent basis. It was too bad; we both liked him. I asked Mary to do a couple of things for me in the city the next day. She asked if I minded if she visited her cousin in Brooklyn when she was done. I assured her I didn’t.
I checked into a park-view room at the Four Seasons on 57th Street. I could have afforded an immense suite with a view of the park—hell, if I liquidated some things I could have made a respectable offer to buy the whole damn hotel—but I chose a standard room with a view of the park. I like luxurious hotel rooms but I don’t like big hotel rooms. They don’t feel right to me. I’ve never liked huge bathtubs either.
Don’t know what that’s all about.
If I ever got around to having the luxury of confronting my secondary demons, it’s something I’d consider working out with a shrink.
A bowl of fruit, a bottle of Badoit, and an ice bucket with a tall bottle of Yebisu—nice touch, I admit—awaited me when I walked into the hotel room. I hadn’t told anyone but LaBelle and Thea where I was staying in New York, so the fact that the Death Angel had tracked me to the Four Seasons was the real message. It wasn’t super-spy stuff, but it was a message nonetheless.
The presence of the Badoit was the exclamation point, however. Badoit is mineral water from France—think Pellegrino, but France, not Italy.
Maybe five or six people in the world knew that Badoit was my preferred sparkling water; to my knowledge I’d never made a big deal of that predilection with anyone. If you hadn’t had dinner with me in Paris or Nice, you wouldn’t know I had a thing for Badoit.
But the Death Angel knew.
The note on the silver tray with the fruit and water wasn’t signed. The neat, androgynous script welcomed me to New York and suggested—ha!—an eleven A.M. rendezvous in the main lobby at MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn’t been back to MOMA since Taniguchi’s overhaul had begun, so I planned to walk over early and check out the progress that had been made to the building before I made my way back to the street-level lobby.
They’re too infrequent, but New York City sometimes has days that are as crystalline as anything I get to experience four days out of five in Ridgway. What’s different in the city is that the inhabitants recognize how special those days are and they all come out to celebrate. On glorious days in Manhattan the sidewalks come alive, the plazas and parks fill with people, and cafés and restaurants push tables out into the sunshine. On those days a descent into the dreary subway feels like torture, and for a few fleeting hours visitors and tourists have no trouble believing that there really are so many people squeezed onto that little island.
I woke to one of those days in Manhattan, and—like a few hundred thousand other people who decided to skip school, or work, or whatever to enjoy the weather—I gave up on my plan to spend the morning inside the usually irresistible galleries of MOMA.
She caught me on the sidewalk just outside the entrance to the museum on 53rd Street. I wondered if I was under surveillance.
Did it matter?
Nah.
She wasn’t the elegant and sophisticated Park Avenue lady this time; she wore denim jeans that celebrated her ass and a supple leather jacket that was layered over a thin sweater that scooped down to reveal the swell at the top of her breasts. This was the costume of an Upper West Side wife heading out for lunch and some minor-league shopping with her girlfriends. Not Bergdorf shopping, or Henri Bendel shopping, or Jimmy Choo shopping. Not even Madison Avenue boutique shopping. Something slightly downscale and funky.
I wasn’t surprised by the exuberance of her greeting this time around; I was actually looking forward to it. I’d already removed my jacket to make the initial body search easier for her, and more fun for me.
“Hi,” I said into her ear as she pressed herself against me and her hands rubbed up and down my back. “If we’re going to pretend to be so closely acquainted, I should probably know what to call you.”
“Call me Lizzie,” she whispered back. “Nobody else does. It can be our special thing.”
She pulled away from me and took my jacket from my hands. For the next few moments, as she absently palpated its seams and folds without appearing to be doing anything at all, I felt an incongruous pang of envy for my sport coat.
“I was just heading inside,” I said, pointing toward the museum, playing along. “Are you free to join me?”
“I wish I could, oh I do, but I don’t have time. Maybe I could squeeze in a minute for coffee, though. How does that sound? Come on, let’s,” she said, knowing I would. Knowing almost any male would, not to mention a healthy percentage of females. She grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the distant corner. As soon as we’d started hustling to the end of the block, I recognized two important things: one, that she was walking me against traffic, and two, that she was leading me toward the familiar waiting Town Car.
“Here we are,” she said. “You remember the tune?”
“I think I could hum a few bars.”
In perfect pitch, she sung the first few lines of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Yes, the old Beatles classic that was the ring tone on my cell phone.
I slid into the car and she followed me inside.
How did she know that?
We headed uptown this time in the direction of Central Park, which meant that there was to be no return visit to Nobu in my immediate future. Routine midmorning congestion impeded our progress until the driver steered the car past The Plaza onto one of the roadways that weave through the park. I’ve never known the names of the streets in Central Park. But that was the point in the journey where Lizzie began to frisk me more thoroughly.
“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked, trying to flirt. “Can I be of some help? I know where everything is. Especially the good parts.” She was busy on my left leg, tracing my Achilles tendon, squeezing a little too forcefully at the hard muscle in my calf, and using her fingernails provocatively as she skated up the vulnerable spot behind my knee. “Weapons, wires? What?”
“I’m not looking for anything,” she teased. “This isn’t part of my job description. I do this only because it’s fun. For some reason I don’t understand, people don’t seem to mind.”
I laughed and lifted my arms. She shifted on the seat so that her knees and my thighs were in firm contact, and began to do her thing on my upper body. She said, “I’ll finish what I was doing down there later.”
I relaxed and let myself appreciate
her doing her thing on my upper body for the next half minute or so. True to her word, she then did indeed finish what she had started doing down there.
I was definitely one of those people who didn’t seem to mind.
The driver exited the park on the Upper East Side just before we reached the reservoir. I reminded myself to pay attention to where we were. In a couple of minutes he pulled over to the curb at a bus stop just beyond the corner of 86th and Third.
I smiled as I looked outside at the storefront.
She said, “We’re here.”
I was still smiling. “At least I know where ‘here’ is this time.”
“Well, it is kind of hard to miss,” she admitted, glancing up at the brilliant yellow-and-tropical-fruit–colored sign.
She crossed over me on the seat, her face so close to mine that I could make a snap appraisal about the quality of her skin—a persnickety dermatologist would rate her complexion almost flawless—and stepped out of the car first. I followed her onto the sidewalk in front of Papaya King. On the way into the dog palace she stole a peek down Third checking, I assumed, for tails. I let my eyes follow hers down the block to see if I could spot any evidence we’d been followed.
I couldn’t.
Cool.
Like Nobu, Papaya King is one of those restaurants in New York City that live up to their hype. At Papaya King, the hype is about hot dogs.
We joined the queue that snaked to the counter. With the weather as good as it was, the prospect of a quality al fresco lunch had apparently tempted much of the population of the Upper East Side, and it appeared that many of them were lined up in front of us waiting to eat at the legendary frankfurter emporium. With the weather as good as it was, though, nobody seemed to care about the length of the line. They get little credit for it, but in normal circumstances New Yorkers do lines well. In glorious weather, New Yorkers do lines marvelously.
“Is it just you and me today?” I asked Lizzie.
“And a pretty healthy chunk of Manhattan. Would that disappoint you? If it were just you and me.”
“Hardly. So is it?”
She eyed me. She didn’t just look at me; she eyed me. But she didn’t answer me, exactly. “You’re married,” she said, at once reading my mind and mockingly dismissing me.
I decided to continue to play along. Why? I flirt for two reasons. I flirt for amusement. And I flirt for advantage. In my youth, the advantage I sought was almost always sexual. The older I get, the more complicated the advantage I’m seeking has become. The reality is that I prefer advantage. What bravado and bluster accomplished for me in repartee with men, flirting accomplished for me with women.
The amusement factor? That was more of a constant. Flirting with Lizzie was fun.
I said, “Are we discussing breaking my vows, Lizzie? What an interesting progression. I thought we were discussing lunch at one of Manhattan’s fine dining establishments.”
She squeezed my hand and looked away from me, up toward the big menu board. “I like you,” she said. “I’m sorry about the circumstances of our meeting. I am. But … you know—”
I finished her thought for her. “Business is business. Don’t be sorry.”
She squeezed my hand again.
“I like you, too,” I said.
“So what are you getting?” she asked.
Aroused? I thought, but quickly realized that her question had an alternative, more likely, connotation.
I didn’t have to look up at the menu board: I knew my Papaya King preferences by heart. I said, “An Original Special with a Tropical Breeze. Or—if I feel especially adventurous when we finally get up to the counter—I may just go for a couple of Slaw Dogs and a Tropical Breeze. What about you?”
“You don’t get curly fries? I love their curly fries.”
“I’ll steal some of yours.”
“Try, and you’ll leave the city without one or two of your favorite fingers.”
I laughed. “You get the King Combo, then?”
“I do.”
“Kraut?”
She raised then lowered her eyebrows in one quick, provocative move. “I’ll do kraut if you’ll do kraut,” she said. We both recognized that we’d become engaged in the sort of bartering that new lovers do about garlic as they sit down at a red-sauce trattoria on a night when they know that whatever they eat is going to end up being only an appetizer.
I said, “Tell you what—I’ll do one Slaw Dog and one Original with onions if you’ll do kraut.”
We shook on it.
Want to know what I was thinking?
I was thinking that Thea would never have kidnapped me for lunch and whisked me uptown through Central Park to the original Papaya King. She wouldn’t have ordered the King Combo—no way—and she would never, ever have thought about getting kraut or onions in polite company unless she had a fresh tin of Altoids in her perfect little Kate Spade shoulder bag.
No, if I’d been with Thea instead of with Lizzie, my wife would have been leading me up Madison Avenue from the hotel on 57th, skipping from precious boutique to precious boutique like a flat stone finding its way across a still pond, telling me the whole time all the good things she’d heard about the little restaurant that just happens to be inside Barneys.
Nor was I thinking at all that Lizzie might someday be the person who would plan my death.
Funny thing.
At the time, in the simple territory of my mind, I was just out on an errand buying some insurance, having a midday meal with my new insurance agent.
I was being a grown-up.
And, sure, I was flirting with a pretty girl on a lovely day in Manhattan.
What on earth was wrong with that?
SEVENTEEN
Waiting on line at a Mickey D’s drive-thru has never managed to make me hungry. I don’t salivate driving past a Taco Bell. But waiting my turn at Papaya King, watching those dogs nestle together and curl and crisp on that grill, and listening to them sizzle and spit, made me ravenous. Lizzie somehow snagged us a pair of stools at the narrow counter while I waited impatiently for our food to arrive.
I was still expecting my comedically contrived host from Nobu either to join us or to replace Lizzie as my dining companion, so I was surprised, and pleased, that when I tracked her down with our food she hadn’t pulled over a third stool. She saw something else in my eyes—something besides my surprise, something that I was quite aware I was feeling, but that I hadn’t been intending to communicate to her, either directly or indirectly.
“You’re married,” she admonished me, with a superfluous “tsk.” “Do I have to say everything twice?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, sitting down across from her. “This is lunch. Lunch. Married men eat, you know.”
She covered an involuntary laugh with a quick exhale and a murmured, “Not all of them,” but otherwise let my comment float by. She said, “Anyway, I know things about you that your wife doesn’t know.”
I thought about that claim for a moment, and I wondered what it was she knew and whether it attracted or repelled her. Roll of the dice. I said, “You probably know things about me that I don’t know.”
“That’s probably true, too.”
With a jab as quick as the flit of an iguana’s tongue, I grabbed one of her curly fries. She gave me a look that only hinted at what I’d get if I tried to steal, say, a kiss, instead of a fry.
The look, I admit, made me tempted to try.
We sat in silence for a while. I ate slowly, savoring my food, but also savoring the opportunity to watch her eat. Why?
Figure it out.
One and a half dogs down, she dipped a final Cajun curly fry in ketchup, nibbled it slowly, and then dabbed a Papaya King napkin at a few different locations on her lovely lips. “You’re not sure about us,” she said. She paused just long enough at that point that I considered the possibility that the “us” was she and I. When she continued, however, and added, “About what we do,” I knew that th
e “us” she was talking about was she and her Death Angel compatriots.
“So it’s time for business,” I said, stating the obvious. The clamor and bustle and informality all around us made Papaya King an almost perfect location for a confidential business meeting about insuring one’s timely death. “But I have this small problem. I’m congenitally suspicious of doing business in situations where the other party knows more about me than I know about them.”
“Ah,” she said.
“It’s a philosophy that has served me well over the years. Old dogs, new tricks, you know?”
“I’m sure it has served you well. See if this helps you with your dilemma: This business—what we do—is all about asking people like you to yield some control now, so that you can be certain to have control later.”
“Later? When?”
“When your force of will, and your ability to move mountains, may be a little bit more compromised than you’ve grown accustomed to. As a general rule, we tend to serve only clients who share your control issues. Those who are indifferent about control don’t gravitate our way. Think about it.”
She threw her napkin on top of her remaining food, as though she needed to put a physical barrier between herself and her desire for more … something. I made a mental note of her need for an artificial wall. This wasn’t a woman to whom self-control of appetites came naturally.
I admit that I like that in a woman.
“There’s something else you should know about me: I’m more of a control freak than most wealthy men,” I said.
“You think so?” she teased.
“I do.”
“I wasn’t being completely honest with you a moment ago,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “We’re actually here today so that I can invite you—no, encourage you—to request a refund of your enrollment deposit.”
“ ‘We’re’ here today? Who’s ‘we’?” I looked around. “Is that other guy here someplace? From Nobu? Or is he off practicing his set for the next open-mic night at Carolines?”
“You and me,” she said. “Just you and me.” She was looking at me, and she reached over and once again rested her palm on my cheek, insisting my attention be on nothing but her.
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