by Susan Cox
The bouncers, the “good boys,” were very fierce looking, with their tattoos and shaved heads, but rather sweet. They were both wearing dress slacks and lightweight windbreakers with the Venus de Milo name and logo. They finished each other’s sentences and smiled agreeably every time I used their names.
They remembered the priest. “He was kind of whisper yelling at first,” Roger said. “Then he got worked up and started yelling for reals, but like he didn’t do it on the regular, y’know?”
His colleague, Stitch, nodded agreeably. “We got over there fast because the guy he was yelling at was a good customer, y’know. They even started to get into it a little bit—the priest made a move on him, and our customer grabbed back, broke a chain and cross from around the priest’s neck, and pushed him away. We use conflict resolution techniques, took a class and everything,” he said proudly, “so we got the Father to come with us and we took him outside. That took care of things, and the guy at the table left us fifty bucks each at the end of the night. Classy guy.”
“Do you think they knew each other?”
“Yeah, they did. The Father’s cross was on the floor under the table, and our customer picked it up and said he’d get it back to him.”
“Roger. Stitch. Did you hear what the … er … Father was so angry about?”
“He was kind of hard to understand,” Roger said apologetically. “But it was maybe about some girl, I think. Something like that. I mean, he had this weird accent. We get good at accents,” he confided. “I mean we hafta, y’know? It wasn’t Asian—they all sound different, but they sound kinda musical, except flat, and it wasn’t Hindi or Tagalog, because they’re real distinctive too.” He looked at Stitch, who nodded, and took up the litany, frowning slightly in concentration. “It wasn’t French or Italian or nothing like that. Mighta been Russian.” He looked at Roger.
“Yeah,” Roger said, “it coulda been Russian or one of those languages. We getta lotta Russians.” He frowned. “I dunno, though; doesn’t seem like it was Russian. I’m not sure I’d know if it was Turkish. We don’t get many customers from Turkey or, y’know, the Middle East,” he added. “They’re mostly Muslim, and those guys don’t drink. They like a titty show, though.” He and Stitch shared a glance and a snigger.
Stitch took up the tale before I could stop him or steer the conversation in a more helpful direction. “But they mostly buy sodas. Our customer was drinking top shelf scotch. Twenty-five bucks a pop. Too expensive to get hammered; we keep an eye on the drinkers,” he added, “y’know, in case of trouble.”
“When you took the Father outside, what did he do?”
Stitch looked at Roger, who thought about it. “He just stood there for a coupla minutes, then he apologized, I think, and left. He crossed over Green, and we thought maybe he was headed to Peter and Paul’s, it’s just a block over that way, but he went into the pizza place across the street.”
“Musta been hungry,” Roger said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“A large meat lover’s,” Nat said at the counter as he sent me to commandeer a booth. The restaurant smelled deliciously of basil and tomato sauce and fresh baked bread. It was a busy place, with people picking up pizzas to go and cheerful groups taking up the tables and booths.
While I waited in my booth, and wondered with foreboding if a meat lover’s was as bad as it sounded, a waitress took an order for a pitcher of beer.
Nat joined me. “Did you get beer?”
“Should be here in a minute. What’s a meat lover’s?”
“Cheese pizza with about four pounds of ground beef, salami, pepperoni, ham, chicken, and bacon.”
“Mmmm.”
He smiled at me. God, he was gorgeous. “C’mon, English; they have pizzas where you come from.”
“With ham and sweet corn or artichoke and fresh tomato, not what sounds like half an abattoir.”
“Next you’ll be tellin’ me McDonald’s sells veggie burgers over there.”
“Well—”
He shook his head. “No. Just, no. Besides, it’s protein and I’m damn near hollow.” He settled his Louis Vuitton messenger bag on the bench next to him and tugged at one shoulder of his lavender cashmere pullover because, apparently, it was microns out of true. I knew better than to interrupt. He finished rearranging himself and looked up. “What did you think of ol’ Zane?”
“Seemed helpful. Nice enough fellow—guy. Weird name.”
“Pretty common in Texas. Not short for anything; it’s just Zane. I kinda liked him.”
I rolled my eyes. “I gathered. A bit old for you.”
“Maybe. Could be he’s a daddy. Am I up for being ordered around and wearing a collar?” He seemed to consider it for a few seconds and then he grinned. “Nah, prob’ly not.”
“He’s pretty, though.”
“Hmmm.”
I hesitated. “Did that description Vanessa gave us sound familiar at all?”
“What, the guy? Not so’s I noticed. D’you think I’d make a good Zane? I could have a professional name at The Coffee, like the waitress and the dancer.”
“It would have to have the same initial, like Nicky or Noel. He was kind of bossy, now I think about it.”
“Maybe in a good way,” Nat said, with a campy little flutter of his eyelashes.
“Don’t daddies want twinks? You’re not a twink.”
“Well, thanks for that,” he said, and then scowled. “Twinks don’t have to be blonde.”
“Oh, please. Too tall. Why are we even talking about this? Nathaniel is a good name. And Nat is good—short and easy to remember. Come to think of it—your name is Nathaniel.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“So why are you Nat and not Nate or Nathan?”
He shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
“Nat?”
“I was small and hyperactive as a kid,” he said reluctantly. “Apparently, I was a real pest.”
“Um, okay, but—small and hyper—” I stopped and my eyes flew open wide. “Oh my God! Your name is Gnat? Like a mosquito?” He grimaced and then nodded. “But that’s a much better name for the coffee shop,” I said gleefully. “Gnat’s Coffee.”
He looked around quickly and hissed, “Don’t you tell another livin’ soul, Theo.”
Our order arrived just then, and as we each helped ourselves to a heaping pile of meat masquerading as a pizza, I decided to be merciful. I could always pick up the name thing another time. Often.
“Speaking of names, did you notice we didn’t get a name?” I swallowed hurriedly, inhaled, and waved my hand around in front of my face in the universal sign for o-my-god-that-cheese-just-scorched-everything-it-touched.
“I did notice, yeah. Think they don’t know it?”
I shrugged. “Could be.”
He looked thoughtful. “I’m sorta surprised we got as far as we did. I mean, how come they talked to us at all?”
Our waitress seemed happy enough to pause by our table for a chat; the rush seemed to be settling down, and Nat had folded a twenty-dollar bill under the cheese shaker.
“We get priests pretty often because we’re so close to Peter and Paul,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t wear their collars; I think they’re embarrassed because of all the, you know, scandals, but we can tell they’re priests. We know our regulars, anyway. They’re good guys.”
“This one came in Wednesday night a week ago. He was wearing a suit,” I went on, “all in black with his collar.”
She pursed her lips.
“And he had a gold tooth at the front and a very strong accent,” I said.
“Yeah, okay, him. He ordered a soda and sat at that table by the window, nursing it for, like, two hours watching the street.”
“He was alone? Did he talk to anyone?”
She thought for a minute and eyed the twenty-dollar bill. “Just after he came in, a guy sat down at the table with him. They talked for a couple of minutes.”
“Was the second guy ol
der, wearing a sports coat, with gray hair?”
“No, nothing like that. He was younger, in jeans and a hoodie. A guy I think, could’ve been a girl, hard to say; I had a full section and I was busy.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much. The young guy left; the priest stayed here and nursed his soda for about another hour, then he suddenly got up and left. Didn’t leave a tip, and that’s one of my best tables. I like to seat big parties there so people passing by can see what they’re eating; it’s good advertising, right?” She wrinkled her nose. “A priest by himself drinking a soda wasn’t doing us any favors.”
“Did you notice which way he went when he left?”
“Yeah, ’cause I was sort of pissed. Though I guess priests don’t have much money. So I watched him and saw him cross the road.”
“Toward the Venus?”
“Yeah, pretty funny, right, like one of those jokes, so I kept watching in case he went in, but he didn’t. He picked up a guy who was leaving.”
“What did the guy look like?”
“I couldn’t really tell; I mean, it was across the street and all, and kind of dark.”
“Did they argue?”
“No—just the opposite. They talked for a minute, then went off together. Then I stopped watching because I had a customer.”
So Sergei had met with two men on the night he was killed. And I had no idea who they were.
The meat lover’s was about as bad as I’d feared, but I was starved, so I finished my slice anyway.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Nat dropped me off, waiting to make sure I’d opened my front door and closed it behind me before making a merry little toot on his horn and heading toward home.
Lucy would usually waddle out to greet me and see if I’d been out buying Milk-Bones, but when I opened the door and switched on the hall light, she didn’t appear. I checked her basket in the living room, but she wasn’t there, either. Again, unusual. I checked to be sure the door to the back stairs was closed, then walked down the hall to my bedroom and pushed open the door. The light from the hall fell on her. She was curled up on my bed, fast asleep, tight against a man-sized lump in the duvet.
“Ben,” I whispered. The duvet shifted, and he hauled himself up against the headboard and blinked at me. “Hey,” he said, and then grunted when I landed on him. Lucy growled and jumped off the bed, which was good, because there wasn’t room for three of us, and I wasn’t leaving.
“You never call; you never write,” I said, kissing him between every word.
He answered the thought rather than the words in between kisses.
“I flew stand-by at the last minute, and grabbed a cab as soon as we hit the ground at SFO. I sent you a text. God, it’s good to be home. I missed you.” His arms closed around me, strong and warm. He felt wonderful.
“How long have you been home? Did you get something to eat? There’s some stuff in the fridge; I could make you a sandwich, or do you want coffee or a beer or—” I burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, is it that bad?”
“You don’t know!” I sobbed. “Katrina’s dead, Nat found fingers in his microwave, Sabina and I found a dead priest, and Davie and Grandfather have been arrested.”
He pulled the duvet around us both while I grizzled and sniffed. Then he said quietly, with a sort of wonder, “Have I been gone longer than six weeks?”
An hour later he had calmed me down a little, and I was pulling a meal together—a recipe Sabina and I worked on after I told her about my pathetically limited range of menu items—when Ben dropped his own devastating piece of news.
“There’s a lot going on, but after tonight there might not be time to talk so—I’ve decided to take the bar exam here.”
I stopped sawing the bread into lopsided doorstops—slicing bread isn’t as easy as YouTube makes it look—and glanced over at him in surprise. Ben wasn’t looking at me, he was rummaging in a drawer for spoons as if he hadn’t just walked into a minefield of atom bomb proportions.
“You are?”
He frowned. “What do you think we’re doing here, Theo? I’m not just passing time; I’m all in.” He sounded exasperated.
He’d been looking dissatisfied before he left this time, and I’d started to think he meant to break up with me. I’d even been trying to get used to the idea and deciding I wouldn’t like it. I’d be the first to admit I was difficult to get close to, and I was sure he’d tired of the effort. I was equally sure admitting how much of our life together was built on lies would be the tipping point, and he would leave me anyway.
I swallowed. “No, of course, I know that. I just—I mean, you haven’t mentioned the bar exam before, and you took me by surprise, that’s all. Um—when is it? Do you have to study?” Was that the right thing to say? Did I sound pleased and interested instead of terrified? I served up two bowls of cassoulet, forgetting that I’d already eaten two pounds of meat on my pizza.
He looked slightly mollified, although he was watching me carefully. “It’s held twice a year; the next time is March.”
“March, right,” I said and hoped I didn’t sound as relieved as I felt. March was months away; surely by then I’d have thought of a way to tell him who I was. I put the hot bowls on the forest green place mats Nat gave me to match some cooking pots he’d made me buy, and put out the basket of inexpertly cut bread. Ben poured olive oil into a shallow terra-cotta dish I didn’t remember ever seeing before. It didn’t seem like the right time to ask him where it came from.
“California doesn’t have reciprocity with other states, so I have to take the exam here. I’ll need to get up to speed on California law—”
I stopped staring at the terra-cotta dish. “Is the bar exam here difficult?” I stirred the cassoulet in my bowl and took a cautious mouthful.
“Yeah, it is. Maybe the toughest in the country.” He tasted the cassoulet, too. “This is good, Theo.”
I grinned at him. “Don’t sound so surprised. So, um, do you think you can pass it? I mean, I’m sure you’ll pass it,” I said more robustly. “You’ve already passed it, right?”
“I’ve already passed two.”
“Two?”
“New York and DC, and in case you were wondering, New York’s was tough.” Ben could be very dry.
“It’s all one country; why don’t they all have the same exam?” I found America puzzling in so many ways, and the culture shocks kept on coming. We might have shared a language, more or less, but things like this exposed the traps set for the unwary person trying to fit in.
“Maybe it has something to do with the piecemeal way we became a country.”
“How do you mean?”
“It took, what—nearly two hundred years for us to get to fifty states?”
I hoped that was a rhetorical question, because I had no idea. English schools spend about half an hour on the American Revolution and no time at all on the American Civil War. I’d spent a lot of time memorizing the names and reigns of kings and queens. We have two thousand years of our own history to get through, and if there’s any time left over to spend on foreign wars, we opt for those we fought against the French. I assume that’s because they’d been entangled in our own history since the days of Alfred the Great and because, in spite of the grudging respect accorded Napoleon, we felt better about ourselves when we beat him.
He went on. “A lot of states joined up after they already had established legal systems.” He looked thoughtfully at the bread before taking a chunk. “Louisiana’s is based on Spanish and French law instead of English common law.”
I didn’t know what Louisiana had to do with anything, but there was apparently a link with France I’d missed somehow. I was already lost, but I nodded as if I knew what that meant. Being a university dropout had its downsides when it came to conversations about cultural mores, and when the culture was transatlantic, it was even harder to keep up.
After we cleared away our dinner things, I took Lucy d
ownstairs for her late-night outing and followed her around as usual, while Ben built a fire upstairs. It was late, but he said he wasn’t tired, and I was too wired to sleep. When I came back upstairs, he had the file from Katrina’s office in front of him on the coffee table. My eyes went straight to it as I walked into the room.
He leaned toward me over the back of the couch. “Found it,” he said, “under the pillows.”
“Oh God—did you read it?”
“I glanced at it. Why do you have a dossier on our neighbors that looks like part of a law firm’s filing system?”
I stared at him, horrified and embarrassed. Why, oh why, hadn’t I burned the damn file, or handed it over to Nat, or not taken the blasted thing in the first place?
“I stole it from Katrina’s office, but you can’t ask me why.” I was taking too many shallow breaths and talking too fast. I went over to sit on the coffee table before my legs gave out and snatched up the file.
Ben was silent for what felt like two hours. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Can I ask what you’re planning to do with it?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Am I allowed to ask if you’ve read it?”
I shook my head so fast it made me dizzy. “No. I mean, yes, I’ve read it, but I felt guilty invading people’s privacy.”
He started to say something else, then closed his mouth and made a sort of huffing noise. He started to stand but then he bent forward, his shoulders shaking, and I realized he was trying not to laugh and losing the battle.
“It’s not funny!” I hissed at him, and he looked up at me, straightening his face and clearing his throat.
“No, I can see that,” he said and sat back on the couch. “So you have ethical concerns about privacy, but not about stealing. Good to know.”
I blushed. “Katrina was gathering information about people as if—I don’t know, as if she planned to blackmail them or something.”
“And you knew about the file and so—what?—after she was killed you decided to steal it to save everyone some embarrassment?”