by Tim Lees
“But, see,” I said. “You can’t just walk into a supermarket, pick it off the shelf, can you?” I pretended to read signs. “Bread . . . canned veg . . . deities.”
“I didn’t buy it that way.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“It’s a very obvious remark, then.”
Her headscarf had slipped back. I could see the pink scalp under her thin, fine hair: hair like baby’s hair, it seemed so delicate.
I said, “You bought it on the internet?”
“I don’t use that thing.”
“It would be good if you could tell me. Helpful. Also,” I said, “personally. I’d really like to know.”
“Personally?”
“Professional curiosity. I’ve spent half my life collecting these things. ‘Retrieving,’ we call it. It’s hard work. Dangerous. It’s also difficult. You need a certain mind-set, special skills . . . And now you tell me there’s some guy, just selling bits of them—what? Out on the street? I want to know how that happens. See?”
An open doorway blared a few lines of an old Stones song, then cut off, dead.
Melody Duchess said, “He got in touch with me.”
“OK.”
“He said he’d heard about me through a mutual friend, though I don’t see how. My friends are dead. But that’s what he said. ‘A mutual friend’.”
“He—what? He wrote to you? Phoned you?”
“Oh, the telephone. There’s no letter. There’s no . . . evidence, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Tell me the rest.”
“We met. Not at my apartment—I wouldn’t have him there. I’m not stupid, asking someone I don’t know into my home. We met at the bagel shop on the corner. He told me he could get me . . . something that would help.”
“Help.”
“He was very . . . personable. Good salesman. Not pushy. Oh no, no. That would have put me right off. He simply outlined what he had. Then he let me think about it.”
“Does he have a name, this man?”
“Mike—Mark—something like that.”
“Can you describe him for me? Tell me what he looked like?”
“Oh, I was only with him a few minutes. I gave him the money, he gave me the goods. That’s all that happened.”
I dodged around a woman with a pram.
She said, “There is one thing. That silly affectation. He wore sunglasses. And really—well, it was like today. No sun at all.”
“You mind me asking what you paid?”
“What I had access to. He wanted more, but I talked him down. I never let a man beat me in a deal. Not ever. Three thousand, if you want to know.” She said this with a certain pride. “He asked for five.”
“Three grand? To somebody you didn’t even know? Just like that?”
“I told you. If I don’t spend it, it’ll just go to Mount Sinai.” She put her head up, and the skin of her throat stretched in webs. “I got the cancer, Mr. Copeland. Kind of puts a new perspective on things, don’t you think?”
It rained that afternoon, and we wound up at the Degas exhibition after all. And then I pushed her to her building on the far side of the Park on 86th. The doorman took her from me and whisked her to the elevator and I never got the chance to visit her apartment, or see the goods, or do a reading on them, which is what I’d wanted. She wasn’t stupid, and she certainly wasn’t going to ask a man she didn’t know into her home.
Chapter 5
Wish You Were Here
“Still hate her?”
Angel’s voice was soft and smoky; I pressed the phone a little tighter to my ear.
“Yes. No. Christ . . . I’m too tired to have opinions.”
“Tough job?”
“Shouldn’t be, but—yeah. Yeah.”
I poured myself another drink, watching the lights of Jersey glittering across the river.
“It’s people,” she said. “A people job. And you know what you’re like with those.”
“She thinks I call you ‘Dr. Farthing’.”
“Maybe you should. Remind you who’s in charge.”
“Yeah. Dead romantic.”
She said, “This was meant to be our time together. Don’t tell me about romance. You know?”
“Life with the Registry . . .”
“It’s not the Registry.”
“What then . . . ?”
“Decisions don’t get made by companies. They get made by people. Committees, individuals, whatever—but someone makes them. Someone did this to us, and I plan to find out who. And then I plan to hunt them down and kill them. Personally.”
“Ha. I’ll ask around, then.”
“You do that.”
The Registry keeps an apartment in a tall building on Greenwich Street. The décor is as bland and tasteful as in any upmarket hotel, the wall paintings are French impressionists, the carpets beautiful, the view spectacular. And it was mine, however long I cared to stay.
I hated it.
I was tired, bored, and, something I had never thought I’d be, sick of New York. I wanted to move on. But it was Melody’s New York that I’d been seeing: lost landmarks, vanished dreams, the ghosts of memories. She’d dug her way into my life and now I couldn’t get her out again.
“You asked if I still hate her. Well, I don’t. But it’d probably be easier if I did, quite honestly.”
“You’re getting obsessed. I’m jealous.”
“Don’t be.”
I was quiet for a time. Angel said, “You can tell me about it, if you want. You know that.” Then she was quiet, too.
I put my glass down. Looked across the river.
There was a plane there, high up, heading out of Newark, going—I’d no idea where.
“We had a talk today,” I said. “A proper talk. And it was—well. Sort of heartbreaking. I don’t know. Like, on the one hand she’s this nasty, mean old woman, moans about everyone, thinks it was all better years ago, and on the other . . .”
“Go on.”
“She’s scared. She’s really scared. Of everything. She told me she’s got cancer. I don’t know what her prospects are, but at that age, they can’t be good. And she’s just—sad. She misses people. Misses her husband. Knows her life’s about to end and—I can’t explain it. But I hope to God I’m not like that at her age. And the Registry—what they want me doing—”
“Yeah?”
“I was fine with it, I really was. During the day. But now, it’s like we’re trying to take away her final bit of comfort. If it was up to me, I’d walk. Honest I would.”
“Except you won’t.”
“I might.”
“You get the job done. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Long as I’ve known you. You’re a company man.”
I chewed my lip.
“Meaning?”
“Like I say! You get the job done.”
But it hadn’t sounded that way.
“Company man,” she’d said. But I’d heard “stooge.”
I told her, “I’m a Field Op. I don’t do this stuff. She winds me up, and sometimes it’s deliberate, and sometimes maybe not, and it was easier just disliking her. Except that now I’ve seen this other side, this tiny, scared old woman—”
“Yeah, that’s sad. You’re right.”
“And I ache, and I want a fucking bath. And they’ve only got a shower.” I was trying to lighten the mood. “What’s wrong with this country, anyway, you don’t have baths?”
“I’ll raise the issue, next time I’m at the White House.” Then, very quietly, she said, “I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“I wish you were here. I had some stuff to sort out but now I just want you here. Or maybe I’ll come join you there? Is that a good idea?”
But it wasn’t.
“I’ll get this done,” I said. “Till then, I’m better on my own . . .”
I’d walked out on her once. Looking back, it made no sense, and yet I’d done it. Then we’d
met again, in circumstances that would always leave me wondering what had actually brought us back together; what had sparked off the emotion and revived our romance.
We were an odd mix. Even I saw that.
Angel was six foot two. She was a runner and a tennis player. She sang opera. I thought her voice was great. She disagreed. “Fit for choirs and amateurs,” she said. Back when I’d first known her, she’d had a trick of bursting into song in public places—bars, buses, department stores—just to see me cringe and get embarrassed. “It makes you look so English,” she’d explained.
Angel was smart. She had a doctoral thesis I kept promising to read but never had. In conversation, she could break an argument in pieces and pick out the flaws as easily as she could hear a bum note in a musical performance. She was beautiful, talented, and clever.
She was way out of my league.
She just hadn’t realized yet.
One day, she would. But for now, she told me that she loved me, and told me to relax, and not to let things get to me; and that we’d see each other very soon.
Then she left me to my paintings, and my carpets, and my view.
Chapter 6
Perils of the Restaurant Trade
“You think I’m racist, don’t you, Christopher?”
“I think . . . you have some views I don’t agree with.”
She sniffed. “You’re young,” she said, which I was not. “You’ll learn.”
The great green shell of Lady Liberty loomed over us, shining in the sun. We took the waterside path. I wheeled Melody Duchess slowly round the island. A gaggle of Korean girls parted before us, reforming in our wake to take yet more group selfies, while a tiny child threw bread to fish that no one else could see. The skylines of Manhattan, Staten Island and New Jersey made their slow parade around us, as if we were the single fixed point at the center of a small, revolving universe.
I recalled the briefing for the job: be nice, get her to trust you. And, You’re English. She’ll like that.
“I have had many colored friends over the years,” she said. “Are you surprised to hear that, Christopher? You shouldn’t be. I have nothing against the coloreds, not as a race, nor, in most cases, as individuals. But what I’m saying is this: don’t think that their interests are ours. Do you understand?”
“Their interests?” I said, and then, a moment later, “Ours?”
“Now, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m saying. You have your faults, but you’re not stupid, I’m sure of that.”
I was as close to blowing the whole job as it was possible to be.
I didn’t say a word. But she knew what I was thinking.
“Now you’re all steamed up, aren’t you? Because you know I’m right. Everybody knows. The colored people—they know. They’ve always known. You can’t say so. Not in this town. We all have to pretend we’re one happy family. But it’s not like that. Never was and never will be.”
“That’s not experience.”
“In ten years—five years—you won’t recognize this country. The Mexicans, the coloreds, the Asians. You stick around, tell me I’m wrong.”
I remembered a taxi driver I’d been having a few drinks with, back in England. He’d told me, if his fare talked politics, then he’d agree with them. Whatever they said. “I been Labour, Tory, UKIP, RCP, you name it. I been all o’them—for twenty minutes.” His point was simple. If they liked you, then you got a tip. Mission accomplished.
Well, I wanted a tip, too. I wanted this little bit of god-stuff that she had in her apartment, and I wanted some clear notion how she’d come by it. That was my job. That’s why I’d been pushing her around the city for the last few days. So it wouldn’t have been too much effort to agree, or at the very least, to nod, and murmur sympathetically.
I said, “Bullshit.”
She looked at me, and raised her brows.
I said, “You cannot prove a word of that, and for a very good reason. Because none of it’s true.”
“Ha. Colored boy gets shot, half the country’s up in arms, President’s on TV, and you know what? Boy’s a thug, a criminal. How many times we seen that now? How many times?”
“Still bullshit.”
She laughed, a cackle like a pair of crows fighting. “Oh, you people! You are so, so easy to offend!”
“What ‘people’?”
But she was laughing too hard to reply.
The Statue still hung over us. But the Statue, like all well-practiced politicians, gazed off into the distance, and took no interest at all in any little quarrels going on beneath her feet.
He had proposed to her there. Liberty Island.
She told me this only as we docked at Battery Park. Yet it all made sense. The modern city, she took not the slightest interest in, only the parts of it that harked back to her younger days, and to her life with Frugs.
So when she had me make a detour on the way home, and stopped off at a corner in the west 80s, opposite a sports store, I assumed there was a reason for it.
“That,” she told me, “used to be a restaurant. Twenty, thirty years ago.”
I looked at the jerseys and the running shoes, the tennis racquets and the sale signs, imagining the windows packed with diners—somewhere chic, upmarket, yet still neighborhood, I thought . . .
“Frugs closed it down.”
“He . . . ?”
“Buglioni’s, it was called. Buglioso’s. Something like that. Claimed it was a West Side institution. You know the way they do. Well,” she took a deep breath, gearing for a race. “To get to the restroom there, you had to pass the door to the kitchen, and he saw—he actually saw this fellow drop a steak onto the floor. Drop it, pick it up, and serve it.”
“Happens a lot, I bet. Don’t often see it, though.”
“Ah. Ah.” She wagged a finger at me. “You don’t understand. You see—I was the one who’d ordered steak. It was my steak.”
“I see.”
“And Frugs—he was livid. Took it very personally, that way. He had friends in City Hall, you know.”
It was a nice tale. I didn’t like the restaurant folk, and I didn’t like Frugs, either, yet there was something in the telling of it—as if the tenderness, the softness at its heart could only be approached through these harsh, boastful details.
She was not telling a story of revenge. Rather of the love this man had borne her, and the way that he’d defended her, as if he were a knight in some romantic tale.
I said, “You must have loved him very much.”
“He was infuriating. But yes. We were together forty-seven years. He never played around. Not once. I would have known.”
I thought about that: being with the same person for almost half a century. Angel still surprised me with the things she did, the facets of her character I’d never seen before. But ten years, thirty years, forty years on? What would that be like? The same person, breathing next to you each night, waking with you every morning? Saying the same things, doing the same things? Knowing you like no one else has ever done, or ever would?
And then to have it all taken away?
How did you get over that?
“Come on,” she said. “Enough.” And then, “I’ll show you his picture, if you like.”
“Yeah, I’d like.”
“And that other thing you want to see,” she said. “Perhaps we can do something about that, too.”
Chapter 7
The Apartment
The doorman held the door for us. He called the elevator down. He wished us both a happy evening, ran his hand over his shaven pate and smiled, blessing our unlikely union.
Music tinkled in the elevator.
“Home sweet home,” she said, without the slightest joy.
Her place was dark and cluttered. Nothing in it could have been less than twenty years old. There was a flowery, old-fashioned scent, mingling with the mildew and the dust. She pottered around a moment, then surprised me by producing whiskey, pouring me a glass
of it, and another for herself, to which she added soda. She was the only American with whom I have ever drunk who didn’t fill the glass with ice. I wondered if she even had a freezer.
Rich once, perhaps. Not now.
We sat. There were books and magazines piled by her chair. Old issues of Vogue and People and the yellow spines of National Geographic. From the midst of them, she deftly pulled an album, resting it upon the chair arm so that she could turn the pages while I watched. Here was Frugs, back in his youth: a strapping, handsome man, a kind of Cary Grant look, a man you wouldn’t willingly get in a boxing ring with. Later: more portly, a pipe in his mouth, a caterpillar moustache. Elegant in suit and tie, or casual in short-sleeved shirt, enjoying the seasons of New York, the seasons that at last, as they do, had taken him away from her.
Here was a picture of him with a woman on his lap. It took a moment till I realized that this pretty blonde, with her impish little smirk, was my new friend, Melody Duchess. “You were beautiful,” I almost said, then stopped myself, wary of the past tense. “A proper beauty,” I told her, though the styles and fashions were long out of date, so that at times it was like seeing portraits of some primitive, far-distant tribe.
Melody nodded, graciously acknowledging my praise.
“We were a handsome couple, yes. Everybody said so.”
I ooh’d and ah’d and asked all the right questions, and when her glass emptied I filled it with another shot, and fetched the soda water for her, and was attentive and charming as any cheap seducer could be. And when I judged she’d softened up a bit, and when she sat there with a small, nostalgic smile upon her face, I broached my suit.
“Melody,” I said, “there’s something in my pocket that might interest you.”
She eyed me sideways, like a cadaverous Mae West.
She raised an eyebrow.
I burst out laughing.
“Sorry. That was the wrong thing to say. I don’t mean—”
She was chuckling, too, her shoulders shaking, the whiskey slopping in her glass.