by Susan Cox
“Would you like to leave a number?”
He patted his pockets, took out his phone, and clicked through a couple of screens, then recited a number with an unfamiliar area code, which I dutifully entered into my phone under “W.”
Then, making conversation the way you do, especially if you’re still mentally apologizing for thinking he was a pervert, I handed him his bag again and said, “Are you visiting the city?”
“Indeed, yes. I come to visit friend, who died.”
That sounded like a funeral. “I’m very sorry for the loss of your friend.”
He shrugged. “Not close friend,” he said, and I adjusted my sympathetic expression several degrees.
Ignoring my professed ignorance of Grandfather or his whereabouts, he added: “Tell Mr. Pryce it is Sergei Viktor Wolf. From Houston. That is very important, eh? That you mention Houston.”
I nodded, and after waiting for a couple of seconds and blinking rapidly, he said again, “Sergei Viktor Wolf from Houston.”
“Got it,” I said. He hesitated again, very obviously lacking confidence in me as a messenger, but then turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him. Another wisp of fog floated inside.
After he left I took advantage of the store being empty, grabbed the broom, and did a quick sweep around, since he wasn’t the only customer who threw papers on the floor. As usual, and no matter that I’d swept the floor less than an hour earlier, I rounded up a few sprigs of potpourri and a receipt or two and a crumpled, and presumably used, paper napkin. I made sure everything got tipped into the dustpan without getting closer to it than the length of my broom. Sometimes it’s just nonstop glamour around here.
I also swept away the small drift of lightweight rubbish gathered in the doorway. It was usually one of my first jobs upon opening, but I’d had other things on my mind that morning. The prevailing breeze blew in Aromas’ direction, clearing detritus from the entrance of the women’s hat shop opposite and depositing it on mine. It happened all up and down Polk Street, to the chagrin of merchants on this side and the mild satisfaction of those opposite. I made quick work of today’s collection, which was as eclectic as usual, with a discount coupon to the nail salon on the next block, a handful of dead leaves, and a crumpled paper coaster featuring a golden Venus de Milo. There was also a cup from a coffee shop across town, which I hastily stepped on and crushed rather than risk having to explain the prevailing breeze thing to Nat.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I started to worry about Sergei. It was an odd little interlude. Grandfather was using one of several names he was entitled to use (that’s the British upper classes for you), so even as “Mr. Pryce” he shouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar this far from home. Also, I happened to know the area codes for Houston because Nat was from there. His grandparents telephoned sometimes, and he would mouth “713” at me and roll his eyes, because they were apparently living sometime in the 1990s and their calls usually included urgent pleas for him to move away from San Francisco because they were convinced he would catch AIDS here by breathing the air. Sergei Viktor Wolf had given me a different area code. He was lying. Or, I told myself, he lived there but still had his old cell phone number. That happened, right?
“He said his name was Sergei Viktor Wolf. From Houston,” I added conscientiously when I telephoned my grandfather. There was a long silence. “Grandfather?”
“Hang up the phone, Judy,” he said crisply, and the call dropped. I stared at it in my hand, a little surprised. Grandfather is as sharp as someone half his age, which is about seventy, and my name isn’t Judy.
Before I had time to call him back, the shop’s landline began to ring. I’d been told to keep it in case the cell towers were knocked down in an earthquake, but I hadn’t used it since we opened. It was a wall phone with a curly wire on the handset, and shelves had been built around it some time after brick-sized, navy blue phones had their heyday in the 1980s. It had one of those harsh bells that kept ringing and ringing while I moved things around, eventually unearthing it behind a box of body lotion samples.
“Um, hello?” I was pretty sure it was Grandfather again, but it felt odd to be uncertain. It was like being in one of those black-and-white movies where no one knew who was calling until they picked up the phone.
“Theophania, did you use your cell phone while Sergei was with you?”
“Only to put his number into my phone.”
Another silence followed. I could almost hear him thinking.
“Don’t use your cell phone for the time being for any conversation you don’t want overheard—”
“Overheard by wh—?”
“Why don’t we meet for lunch, my dear? The Garden Court at two o’clock?” He hung up again without waiting for my reply, which was worrying. Grandfather didn’t do spontaneous, and he’d been abrupt to the point of rudeness. Grandfather was often abrupt, but he was never rude.
All the same, an invitation from him carried pretty much the same compulsion as a parliamentary writ, so I called Haruto, who lived above the shop in the apartment below mine, and who obligingly came downstairs to keep Aromas open, carrying his Siamese cat, Gar Wood, and telling me about surfing that morning at Ocean Beach. Gar Wood stalked around for a minute or two in the arrogant way of Siamese cats, and then settled into a sunny spot in the window and started to wash one of her back legs. She and my dog, Lucy, had reached a cranky detente. By and large they ignored each other when Lucy deigned to join me in the shop; she usually preferred to stay upstairs, solely, I was convinced, so I’d have to trudge up two flights of stairs at lunchtime to take her down for a break in the gardens.
Haruto looked like a cross between the Mikado and a flower child, with his raven black hair pulled back and wrapped into a knot with raffia. He only needed to sleep for three hours a night, so he was always looking for things to fill in the extra hours. He kept busy designing Japanese gardens and was a sort of freelance security consultant, which meant he spent the early morning hours hacking into his clients’ computer systems to test their fire walls. He worked for me a couple of half days a week, mostly for the entertainment value, I think, or when I needed some extra help, and he’d expressed some interest in buying the shop. Some days I was just about prepared to give him the place, but until it was out of debt, it didn’t seem like a very generous gesture.
He waggled a hand at me as I passed the front window on my way toward California Street. I got nods and smiles from my Polk Street neighbors, who had been accepting, welcoming even, when I’d opened Aromas. I’d bought the three-story building after it had been vacant for years, which meant I had refurbished the neighborhood blight and they’d seemed oddly grateful. One of them told me the building had reached the stage where they were worried about homeless squatters breaking in and setting up camp. Now, if I did say so myself, newly painted, with its climbing rose under control, and Aromas busy and attractive, it was one of the neighborhood jewels. With its new plumbing and wiring it had two full-floor flats. I lived in the top and Haruto was currently my tenant in the middle one. For a short while, Ben had lived in the ground floor studio, but nowadays, when he was in town, he stayed upstairs with me.
My immediate neighbors were Bonbons Chocolat, where I spent too much time and money, and Peter Williams Jewelry. The block also had Donna Marie’s Best Buds, selling bouquets from tin containers on the sidewalk; Mr. Lee’s no-name grocery on the corner; a hardware store; two antiques shops; a couple of clothing shops; an expensive hat shop, whose clientele was largely African-American women; and Hang Chuw’s, which made the best dim sum and garlic noodles in the city. One of the smaller stores at the end of the block did one-hour photo printing and sold cameras. I didn’t know anyone who had their photos printed, but the store stayed in business somehow, and I’d bought my camera from them. There was also our local, Coconut Harry’s; a pizza and falafel place, and a small but pricey Michelin four-star restaurant, which drew people from other parts of the city. And o
f course now there was The Coffee, which filled our need for coffee, pastries, and sandwiches.
It was a neighborhood where people lived, worked, and shopped, on the nicer end of Polk Street, away from the rent boys and SRO hotels farther south. It meant I could do pretty much all of my errands close to home, and I didn’t often have a reason to leave. The truth was, I felt more exposed, less able to protect myself, in areas of the city where strangers might recognize me. I preferred to stay where people knew me—or at least thought they did.
Most of the rough sleepers—what Nat told me are called hoboes here—who normally hung around downtown had been chased into the outer neighborhoods by one of the city’s periodic “Clean Up Market Street” campaigns. In addition to Matthew, who had apparently lived on Polk Street on and off for the past year, the neighborhood now had a couple of mostly pleasant, weathered men using the street as their combination dining room, bedroom, and bathroom. Like Matthew they seemed harmless, although they were considerably more mentally together. St. Christopher’s, the Catholic church on the next block, had a small overnight shelter in the basement where some of them stayed.
I caught the California Street cable car, hopped off at Montgomery, and walked the few blocks to the Palace Hotel on Market Street. In an effort to thin out what had become a sludge-slow tangle of traffic along Market, it was closed to private cars, allowing buses and bicycles and delivery vehicles to make their own accommodations with local pedestrians. I often wondered why the city streets were so much more crowded with people in those old movies, with packs of them waiting to cross the road at every intersection. More people live here now, so where are they all? In their cars, perhaps. But not on Market Street.
The sidewalks on Market were wide and gracious, left over from the time when the street was the city’s main thoroughfare and the main business district as well. I knew from my movie watching that, years ago, theaters and restaurants used to line both sides of the street, but they’d been mostly replaced by discount electronics stores and fast-food places, which gave it a down-market feel. All of which meant that the uber-posh Palace, one of the city’s grandest hotels, was set like a gem in a tarnished pinchbeck setting. As I reached the marble steps, a couple of ragged men with a well-fed dog on a piece of bright yellow rope were shuffling away from the entrance under the watchful eye of a doorman. For some reason, he was wearing a bowler hat, but otherwise he looked ready to bench-press a bus.
When Grandfather arrived at 1:57, I was loitering near the display cases of historical memorabilia, and I saw him before he noticed me. He attracted interested glances as he strode across the lobby—and not just from women. His hair was silver, but he was soldier-straight, with the kind of angular good looks that aged well. The Batgirl stuff disguises some of the resemblance, but Grandfather and I both have our family’s standard-issue, china blue eyes. He was wearing what I always thought of as his casual uniform: gray trousers with a knife-edge crease and an elderly but immaculate navy blue cashmere jacket. He was also wearing an Eton Ramblers tie. He had his Aquascutum raincoat over his arm as usual, but the tie gave me pause—Grandfather wasn’t an Old Etonian, he went to Harrow, as did Lord Byron and Benedict Cumberbatch, although not at the same time. Men of his class and generation wore their ties like labels, to help them recognize fellow members of regiments, schools, universities, and clubs. The Eton tie was as out of place on him as a scribbled mustache on a portrait of the Queen.
He placed a hand lightly at my elbow, and we were seated at one of the Garden Court’s best tables—Grandfather had that effect on maître d’s—before we had time to exchange more than our usual, slightly formal greetings.
Even though the enormous Garden Court was arranged cleverly with see-through screens and potted palm trees to provide the illusion of privacy, it was actually possible to take in the entire room at a glance, which I noticed Grandfather doing as we sat down. Then came the discussion of dishes and ingredients with the waiter, the ordering of a Manhattan for him and their signature flowery iced tea for me, and the obligatory appreciation of what was arguably the most beautiful public room in the city.
I finally interrupted him as he seemed about to launch into details about the glass ceiling dome. “Grandfather, for heaven’s sake. What’s all this about?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ten minutes later I was staring at him, unsure if I was being teased. Except Grandfather didn’t tease.
“You’re not old enough to have been involved in post-war espionage,” I whispered across my salmon salad.
“My father was.”
“Pop-Pop?” My great-grandfather was a kindly old gent who gave me sips of his brandy and pulled gold sovereigns from behind my ears. He’d died when I was about eight years old, leaving Grandfather as the de facto head of our family, even though he had older brothers and sisters. My family was privileged and wealthy and had been that way for a very long time.
“He spent a good deal of time until forty years ago traveling back and forth from the Soviet Union. As a youngster, I used to carry letters for him occasionally.”
I looked at him, aghast. “Pop-Pop used you as—as a courier?”
He gave me a stern look. “Traveling with a child is excellent camouflage. When I finished at Cambridge I joined the—er, firm myself. Your mother, too—”
“My mother? Oh my God. We’re a third-generation family of”—I looked around furtively—“spies?”
Not sure if I should feel slighted that no one had initiated me into the family business, I sat back in my seat and stared at him.
“Close your mouth, Theophania,” he said. My jaws snapped shut. “How is the salmon?”
“How is the—Grandfather! Pop-Pop was a spy? You were a spy? My mother was a spy? Sergei—”
“Probably best if we don’t use that name, my dear.”
“Oh my God. Why didn’t I know any of this? Why tell me now?”
He pursed his lips. “Your courage and resourcefulness recently made me reevaluate my decision not to tell you about the family … history.” If he was giving me undeserved credit for resolving the turmoil of a few months ago, I’d take it, but—“In addition to which,” he went on, “our friend’s appearance at your shop is unsettling. I want you to understand what may be at stake and to be on your guard.”
I dropped my knife and fork with a clatter that startled the young waiter as he approached with a pitcher of iced tea. “What’s going on? Does this have anything to do with Ser—do you know why your friend wants to see you?”
Grandfather put his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “If I had to guess, and I do, then perhaps I have been … outed, and he is concerned about—er—family repercussions.”
“I’m so sorry, dear,” the waiter said with a sympathetic grimace, and then blushed and busied himself filling my iced tea glass before touching Grandfather lightly on the shoulder and withdrawing.
I’m pretty sure all of this went over Grandfather’s head.
“Outed? How could you be outed? And by whom? And why? And whose family are we talking about having repercussions?”
He pulled on one ear. “Remember, my dear, this is conjecture. The family in this case is our American cousins. They will be concerned that their own, er, sons and daughters will be exposed also. Our friend was a colleague twenty-five years ago. But he was injured and left the firm, entering a Catholic seminary to study for the priesthood.” He pursed his lips again. “Truthfully, I wondered if he was in deep cover. He had been involved in a particularly brutal operation in Eastern Europe, and afterward he apparently had a Damascene moment. He eventually went through with his ordination. I couldn’t imagine the firm taking things that far, so I assume he had experienced a genuine conversion. I haven’t heard from him for—it must be twenty years. The last thing I knew, he was in South America. Colombia, I think.”
I had no idea where to locate Colombia on a map. I was on slightly firmer ground with South America, but the only thing I assoc
iated with Colombia was drug smugglers and death squads, having watched an episode of Narcos at an impressionable age. Grandfather moved on while I was still trying to catch up.
“The Americans are extremely sensitive and don’t really trust us—or anyone, really,” he said thoughtfully. “His appearance here might mean that something, somewhere, has gone wrong with—well, it would have to be an historical operation. Or I suppose it could be something unrelated, and he needed my nonprofessional help.”
I tried to keep my expression neutral as I chewed a mouthful of something. He gave me one of his fleeting smiles, and after a short pause, he took a small, leather agenda from the breast pocket of his jacket and slid it toward me. “Please write down the telephone number he gave you.”
I pulled out my phone. “I could just—”
“Write it, please, Theophania. And then erase it from your telephone.”
He glanced at the number and then tore out the part of the page where I’d written it, then kept tearing it until it was practically dust and put some of the dust on his empty plate and the rest of it in his pocket. He took my telephone, scrolled and tapped through several screens, changed a setting or two, and returned it to me. I had no idea what he’d done, and I didn’t like to ask.