“A good restaurant wouldn’t allow a show that bad to be filmed on its premises.”
“Is it really as bad as I think it is?”
“Biological Clock,” he said, “is as bad as it gets. I’m hooked. I fell asleep in front of the TV one night and woke up to your face. Your date berated the waiter for not knowing if the beef was domestic or Argentinian, and you stood up for the waiter.”
I stared. “But that was our first episode. Weeks before I appeared on your radar.”
“If you’re looking to keep a low profile, you might consider a different line of work.”
“Okay, I’m confused. I thought I came to your attention because of this sting operation, you thinking I was in with the bad guys, Little Fish, Big Fish . . .”
“No, I’ve known about you for weeks.” He looked at me. “Unofficially.”
Something went zinging through me. “Is it common,” I said, “for an FBI agent to approach someone he thinks is working with bad guys, to warn her off?”
He looked back at the road. “No. It’s not common at all.”
He was so relaxed. They probably taught relaxation techniques at Quantico. My heart was pump, pump, pumping away like an old washing machine with a spin cycle gone crazy. “And when,” I said, “did you decide I wasn’t a criminal?”
“Last week. I might have recruited you in any case, but then you’d have been a dirty source. I like it better this way.”
“And you’re done investigating me?” I thought about the man questioning Lucien.
“Officially, yes.”
Was that a double entendre? He hadn’t taken his eyes off the road. “Great,” I said. “The FBI thinks I’m clean. If I want to go into crime, this is the time to do it.”
The light turned green. His hand played with the gearshift. He had articulate fingers. “What makes you think I have a sense of humor?” he asked. The car shot forward, leaving my stomach half a block behind.
I said, “What makes you think I’m kidding?”
He looked at me. It was hard to hold his look, because for one thing, I was scared we were going to crash if his eyes didn’t return to the road, and for another thing, eye contact like that says something after a point, something along the lines of Yeah, I’d sleep with you.
He looked away first. I let out a long, slow breath, as quietly as I could, focused on the appealing bump in his nose.
A smile settled in on his face. He said, “This is going to be fun.”
Falcon had valet parking on Sunset Boulevard, but no obvious entrance. A gate to the right of the valet was manned by a woman: intimidating, hip, holding a clipboard. In a careful voice that could turn either respectful or discouraging, she asked if we had reservations. I wanted to say that I had some pretty serious reservations, but I let Simon answer.
“Alexander.”
She thawed, smiled, and crossed the name firmly off the clipboard. “Certainly, Mr. Alexander. Straight on back, left at the arbor. Enjoy your evening.”
We walked down a long path, a sort of floriferous alleyway leading to a doorway. It was an entrance ritual calculated to make us feel Chosen. Good feng shui, Fredreeq would say.
Falcon was all wood and steel and mood lighting, starkness undercut by whimsy, with fur-covered seating cubes scattered around a sophisticated bar. Booths surrounded the bar’s periphery, and a lower room, actually outdoors, complete with trees and bleachers, served as a nightclub. A waiter/runway model showed us to our upper-level booth, gliding silently across a wood floor. I, in my flat size eleven shoes, galumphed along behind, making loud creaking noises.
The booths were constructed for privacy. “Bet no one in this place does drugs,” I said, pulling the curtains around our table experimentally, then pushing them back.
“Think you could forget for two hours what I do for a living?”
“No. Oh, how nice. The elderly gentleman over there dining with his granddaughters. And they say no one dresses for dinner anymore. A little late for teenage girls to be out, don’t you think? My, they’re affectionate.”
“Nervous?”
Oh, dear. We weren’t in a car anymore, we were opposite each other, his blue eyes flickering in the candlelight. Candlelight fosters double entendres.
“I’m not nervous.” But I was, because when the waiter came I ordered a martini with an olive, a drink I’ve had twice in my life and didn’t enjoy, as this was a restaurant where ordering white wine by the glass could be a faux pas, which begged the question of why I cared what some waiter and bartender thought of me, for which I had no satisfactory answer.
Simon asked for something called Ketel One, and the waiter retreated. A man came by and set a small plate on our table. It held two servings of something involving phyllo dough, along with two smaller empty plates.
“Amuse-bouche. Veal,” he said, and vanished.
Simon stabbed one of the appetizers, put it on a plate, and moved it to me. “Then let’s entertain our mouths.”
Not finding veal entertaining, I pushed the plate back toward him. “You speak French. Had I known of your erudition when you were stalking me, I’d have asked you to help me pass my math assessment test.”
“I’d have said no.” He ate his amuse-bouche. “Why test out if you don’t know the subject?”
“Because I don’t like numbers. I don’t want to study them into retirement.”
He pushed my amuse-bouche toward me. “That’s because, underneath that good-girl exterior, you’re your mother’s daughter. You think math’s not creative, it’s for left-brain types. I bet you don’t even like computers.”
There it was again. Computers. Web site. Fan mail. There was something I needed to check out when I got home. “Math doesn’t interest me,” I said. “Can’t I not be interested?”
“Yes. But you aspire to higher education.”
“Not in math.”
“Then half the world’s closed to you. The language of physics. Chemistry.”
“I’m not the scientific type.” I pushed my plate back toward him.
“Really? Art is okay, and religion, but science, that other great mode of human inquiry, holds no appeal. Interesting. A little arrogant.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I have no problem with arrogance; it can be sexy. You really think what bores you isn’t worth learning? Feynman was like that. He thought literature was a waste of time.”
A martini appeared in front of me. I took a long sip from the chilled glass and felt my ears twitch. Imagine getting so heated up about arithmetic. I popped the olive in my mouth and looked at him, his soft white shirt such a textural contrast to the steel booth he leaned against. What a masculine restaurant. Except for those fur-covered seating cubes. I took another sip.
“Chaco,” I said. But I mispronounced it, so that it sounded like “Tcheiko.”
“What?” His body tensed. I could feel it in the space between us.
“Ceratophrys cranwelli, predaceous South American horned frog. I’m painting it. The Chaco. Of the subfamily Ceratophryinae, within the family Leptodactylidae. See? Science.”
Simon relaxed. Smiled. “That’s not science, that’s showing off your Latin.”
The tension had been subtle, but it had been there. Simon had Vladimir Tcheiko on the brain. And he didn’t want me knowing. Tcheiko wasn’t just a drug lord. He was Big Fish.
I was wondering what to do with this when Simon asked how things had gone on the set. I told him I’d followed men to the bathroom all night, lurking in the hallway in case one used the pay phone between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. None did. “And no one,” I said, “stood up and announced, ‘I am Little Fish.’ One Celtic accent, no shopping bags. Nothing I did tonight couldn’t be done by any first-year FBI agent, by the way.”
A waiter refilled our water glasses. Simon thanked him without taking his eyes off me.
“So why me?” I said. “Why me?”
He just kept looking at me. “Stop looking f
or her,” he said, his voice soft.
I said nothing.
It really was a great restaurant. Our waiter brought me a second martini I couldn’t recall ordering, a salad I knew I hadn’t ordered, and some pasta thing. Simon had a steak the size of my shoe. There were colorful sauces, kaleidoscopically arranged on the plates, and an impressive bread basket with skinny breadsticks and curly pretzelly things shooting out like earth-tone flora. The whole experience was enhanced by the fact that I was drunk.
“I’ve never gotten drunk with a G-man,” I said, leaning over the table a little farther than the rules of good posture allowed. “I bet you have a conservative voting record. I don’t often date Republicans, but Joey says they’re good in bed, more so than you’d imagine.”
“It’s not something I’ve spent time imagining.”
“Speaking of Joey, why didn’t you recruit her? She’s brave, she’s intrepid, and she’s a producer of sorts, so she’s got a built-in excuse for hanging around the show.”
“I have my reasons,” he said.
“Let’s hear them.”
He sat back, his body languid, one hand playing idly with the espresso cup in front of him. He studied me. He studied me for so long I forgot what my question was. For a moment I sobered up. Should federal agents even be allowed to date, when the rules of conversation kept getting suspended every four minutes?
“Joey,” he said, “has a lifestyle and certain . . . characteristics that make her less than desirable to work with.” His hand lifted in a “Stop” gesture. “Anything I say about this is going to get you defensive. You’re a little fierce about your friends.”
“You mean I’m fierce about Annika but, Simon, if you knew her better, you’d like her. You’d like her better than me. She knew all this math stuff, she tutored me for free, she had no money but she volunteered at pet shelters, she was kind to plants, and so small, with those red cheeks and worried about World War II and she’s not even twenty years old. If they had a reality show called Who Should Not Disappear into Thin Air? she’d win.”
This was not, perhaps, my most lucid moment, but Simon looked at me with gentleness, a gentleness peculiar to tall men. Tall men with blue eyes. There are male frogs that turn blue in order to attract female frogs, I told myself. This got me to thinking about the most famous frog, the legendary frog turned into a prince by a kiss. I seemed to be living the legend in reverse, seeing men as princes and kissing them willingly, only to find they were in fact amphibians, leading a double life, one on land, one at sea. Perhaps this was because the woman in the legend was a princess and I was a commoner.
At some point we walked the long, long walk out of the restaurant, and when we were halfway down the flower-covered alleyway, Simon stopped. I turned to him, stood on tiptoes as if I were going to tell him a secret, which seems like something an informant might do with an FBI agent, and then I kissed him. He kissed me back. After a while, other people came down the flower-covered alleyway, and we stopped kissing and continued on our way to Sunset Boulevard, where it was the morning after Thanksgiving night.
He put his jacket on me while we waited for the valet parking guy to fetch his car. The jacket was too big. It made me feel little. When you’re a girl who is six feet tall, that is nothing to sneeze at.
31
I woke up on my living room sofa, dressed. Morning. My head hurt. Memory came in slowly, like coffee through a drip machine.
Why wasn’t I in my bed? Had I been so drunk last night I’d lost my way? No, my mother was occupying the bedroom. Okay. What day was it? Friday. I had to work on the frogs. I sat up. All my brains shifted to the front of my head. I lay back down. I sat up again, then stood. Okay, I was really making progress now.
Simon.
I clutched the back of the sofa and closed my eyes. Had we—?
Kissed?
I sat back down. Scenes replayed like a home movie. Kisses. Outside the apartment, under a tree, in the grass, the car, the elevator. I’d found the gun he wore on his waist. He’d checked out the apartment for plumbers, but then what? Please God, tell me he hadn’t stayed. Bad enough to not remember, but with Prana in the bedroom and paper-thin walls—
I got up, and this time made it all the way to the kitchen, to a quart of cold water and medication. I was able to manage the childproof cap on the Tylenol bottle, but the coffee grinder presented a problem. Would it wake my mother? Maybe. Was it worth it? No. This was why God had created instant coffee.
My eyes lit on my computer, sitting on the kitchen table.
While the kettle heated up, I logged on to the Biological Clock Web site. The fact that I hadn’t done so until now raised an interesting question. Did I simply not enjoy computers, or was I, in fact, in denial about this show? Was I, like Prana, appalled?
The Web site was itself a little appalling, all primary colors, capital letters, and exclamation points. I felt like putting on sunglasses. There was a page called “Who’s Got the Best B.C. Body?!” that I chose not to visit. I was drawn instead to “Biological Biographies!”
There was nothing about Carlito, Vaclav, and Henry I couldn’t have written myself, because I’d been dating them, and if there’s one thing I know how to be it’s an attentive date. The competition was another story. I clicked on Kimberly Karmer. Kim was from a large, loving family, was a former Junior Miss, an award-winning clarinet player, and fluent in American Sign Language, thanks to a hearing-impaired mother. In the summer she taught music to underprivileged youth and she was now working in retail while pursuing a master’s degree in psychology. Dear God, I thought, and clicked onto Savannah Brook. Worse. Laker Girl, French major. MBA from Columbia, then spent a year building houses for poor people in Guatemala, currently a systems analyst, whatever that was, for a banking consortium and an equestrienne. And, of course, a black belt in Krav Maga. The kind of date who’d fix your roof, balance your checkbook, and advise you on your groin kicks.
Then there was me. My biographical profile said I designed a line of greeting cards, painted murals, and lived in West Hollywood.
That was it? What about my failed business, my three semesters of junior college, my institutionalized brother? Or my most noteworthy accomplishment, a string of dates that, put end to end, would stretch from Beverly Hills to the Panama Canal? Oh. I recalled Sharon, the battle-weary production person in the B.C. office, begging me for more information.
I imagined adding “drug dealer” to either Kim or Savannah’s biography, and found it plausible. Especially Savannah. Maybe she’d started this sideline in Central America, when she realized the poor of Guatemala weren’t advancing her career fast enough.
I clicked on a feature called “Fan Mail” and discovered I had my own mailbox. My head throbbed wildly. This was what I’d come for, an idea sparked by Vic Mauser. A password was required for the mailbox. I tried my mother’s maiden name, recalling that Sharon had once asked me for it. It worked. A daunting pile of e-mails popped up. I scrolled through, opening one at random. Someone called BarnyardAnimal wanted to know if my breasts were real.
Then a subject line made my heart beat faster: “Latte + 5 Sugars.” I had a vision of Annika at Grounds, our coffee hangout, opening packet after packet of sugar. I’d told her that Doc liked sugar in his coffee too, that maybe there was a correlation between sugar, brown hair, and mathematical ability. The e-mail was two days old. Shaking, I hit “Read.”
Wollie, I hope you find this, I have no other way to reach you. It is so bad, all that has happened. But you must not look for me. The danger is so great and if you die too it will be so bad. I want so much to see you and everyone, but I think I will not so always remember me with kindness. I am crying now as I write but it’s OK. I did not think I believed in God, but now I find I do so everything will be all right, even if nothing turns out as I thought. I did not think my year would end like this, people so much better than I expected and also so so so much worse. It will be over soon please do not look for me PLEASE. Tell N
O ONE I write to you. Do not try to write back. Worse of all would be if you die because of me. Love, Your Little Sister.
I stared at the screen, my thoughts tumbling over one another: she’s alive she’s in danger she thinks she’s going to die she thinks I’m going to die. I typed back, “Are you still there? Are you all right?” and sent it. Almost instantly, a message appeared.
“Message cannot be delivered because mailbox is full.”
I couldn’t move. Her e-mail had come from “feynmanfan.” We’d never e-mailed each other, but this had to be her account. Why hadn’t she emptied her mailbox? Whose computer had she used?
What kind of danger was she talking about? Bombs? Guns? How could I guess? How did she know I was looking for her? I dialed Simon, got voice mail, and hung up. What could I say? I’m in danger. Big, general, nonspecific danger. Rescue me.
Could the e-mail be traced? I picked up the phone, and set it down again. We’d been through this, with Marie-Thérèse’s mail. Yes, but it would take time. Annika’s message had been waiting for two days. It could wait ten more minutes, while I calmed down. I printed it out.
In the hall closet I found some bicycle shorts and a rugby shirt. Hubie’s. They didn’t fit, let alone match, but they’d save me from having to sneak into my bedroom and wake Prana.
What about Prana?
Nothing in Annika’s e-mail suggested the danger was in my apartment, and my mother wasn’t one to respond to threats, in any case. She didn’t believe in medical checkups, earthquake preparedness, or national security advisories, and she wouldn’t believe in this. She certainly wouldn’t alter her life for it.
I went outside and checked the street for female plumbers and curious men with receding hairlines. Then I said a prayer, got in my car, and headed for the Valley.
Halfway up Coldwater Canyon I started to think more clearly. Annika was alive. Or had been two days ago. If she was being held against her will, maybe she’d seen a computer, remembered the show’s Web site, and typed out a fast message. But kidnappers did not typically leave computers lying around. Perhaps she was in hiding and had seen Rico’s disappearance on the national news, which had so distressed her she’d written to me, frightened that what had happened to him would happen to me. But if the danger was so great, why not just tell me what it was?
Dating is Murder Page 23