Seeing this, Candy grabbed up a water pitcher, dipped up what he could of water, and bullied a clown fish into the pitcher.
The other customers watched, liked it, and, with the camaraderie you see only in the face of life-threatening danger, were taking up their water glasses or flinging their wineglasses free of the cheap house plonk and refilling them from water pitchers sitting at the waiters’ stations. The waiters themselves ran about, unhelpfully; the bartender, though, catapulted over the bar with his bar hose to slosh water around the fish.
Wading through glass shards at some risk to their own skin, customers and staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in glasses and pitchers.
It was some sight when they finished.
On every table, an array of pitchers and glasses, one or two or three, tall or short, thin or thick, and in every glass swam a fish, its color brightened from beneath by a stubby candle that seemed at last to have found a purpose in life.
Even Frankie, the owner, was transfixed. Then he announced he had called the emergency aquarium people and that they were coming with a tank.
* *
So who the fuck you think they were?” Karl said, as he and Candy made their way along the dark pavement of Lexington.
I’m betting Joey G-C hired those guys because he didn’t like the way we were taking our time.”
“As we made clear as angel’s piss to him that’s the way we work. So those two spot Hess in there or they get the tip-off he’s there and go in with fucking assault weapons, thinkin’ he’s at that table on the other side of the fish tank, and that’s the reason they shoot up the tank?”
“Call him,” said Candy.
Karl pulled out his cell, tapped a number from his list of contacts, and was immediately answered, as if Joey G-C expected a call.
“Fuck’s wrong with you, Joey? You hire us, then you send your two goons to pull off a job in the middle of a crowded restaurant? No class, no style these guys got. Walk in with Uzis and fired around the room, you’d think they were blind. And did they get the mark? No, they did not; they just shot the place up, including a big aquarium the least you can do is pay for. Yeah . . .”
Candy was elbowing him in the ribs, saying, “Tell him all the fish suffocated and died.”
“And there was all these endangered fish flopping on the floor, some of them you could say were nearly extinct, like you will be, Joey, you pull this shit on us again. Yeah. The job’ll get done when the job gets done. Goodbye.” Karl stowed his cell in his inside coat pocket.
“We saw Hess leave through the side door. You’d think he knew they were coming.”
“Jesus, I’m tellin’ you, C, the book business is like rolling around fuckin’ Afghanistan on skateboards. You could get killed.”
“You got that right.”
They walked on, Karl clapping Candy on the shoulder, jostling the water pitcher as they walked along the street. “Good thinking, C. I got to hand it to you, you got everyone in the place rushing to save the fish.”
The water was sliding down Candy’s Hugo Boss–jacketed-arm. “Don’t give me the credit; it was that blond dame, that girl, who did that. She was the first one to ditch her wine. You see her?”
“The blonde? I guess. What’d she look like?”
Candy shrugged; a little wave of water spilled onto Lexington. “I couldn’t see her face good. She had a barrette in her hair. Funny.”
“You didn’t see her face but you saw a hair barrette?” Karl laughed. “Crazy, man.”
They walked on.
* *
There are those girls with golden hair you half-notice in a crowd. You see one in the outer edges of your vision amid the people flooding toward you along Lex or Park or Seventh Avenues, blond head, uncovered, weaving through the dark ones, the caps and hats, your eye catching the blondness, but registering nothing else. Then you find when she’s passed it’s too late.
A girl you wish you’d paid attention to: a girl you wish you’d paid attention to.
A girl you knew you should have seen head-on, not disappearing around a corner.
Such a girl was Cindy Sella.
* *
Some of them would talk about it later, and for a long time. The businessmen climbing into a cab, the girl with the LeSportsac, her Droid lost inside it.
As if there’d been an eclipse of Apple, a sundering of Microsoft, a sirocco of swirling iPhones, Blackberrys, Thunderbolts, Gravities, Galaxies and all the other smartphones into the sweet hereafter; yes, as if all that had never been, nobody, nobody reached for his cell once the fish were saved and swimming. They were too taken up with watching the fish swimming, dizzy-like, in the wineglasses.
Nobody had e-mailed or texted.
Nobody had sent a tweet to Twitter.
Nobody had posted on Facebook.
Nobody had taken a picture.
They were shipwrecked on the shores of their own poor powers of description, a few of them actually getting out old diaries and writing the incident down.
Yes, they talked about that incident in the Clown Fish Café the night they hadn’t gotten shot, told their friends, coworkers, pastors, and waiters at their clubs, not to mention their partners, wives, husbands, and their kids.
Their kids.
Way cool. So where’s the photos?
Remarkably, nobody took one.
Wow. Neanderthal.
But see, there were these neon-bright blue and orange and green and yellow fish, see, that we all scooped up and dropped in water glasses, and, just imagine, imagine those colors, the water, the candlelight. Look, you can see it. . . .
But the seer, seeing nothing, walked away.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martha Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grew up in Garrett County, Maryland, and now lives in Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
ALSO BY MARTHA GRIMES
Rainbow’s End
The Horse You Came In On
The End of the Pier
The Old Contemptibles
The Old Silent
The Five Bells & Bladebone
I Am the Only Running Footman
Help the Poor Struggler
The Deer Leap
Jerusalem Inn
The Dirty Duck
The Anodyne Necklace
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
The Man with a Load of Mischief
Poetry
Send Bygraves
DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.
COMING FROM SCRIBNER JUNE 4, 2013
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Martha Grimes
Previously published in 1996 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Scribner ebook edition August 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4767-3301-2 (ebook)
Hotel Paradise Page 41