As Nicola left, Audrey gave her a thumb’s-up and Carlos said, “Be brave, young soldier.” Nicola followed Guy to his office. She felt her short suede skirt rub against her legs as she walked. That morning she had looked through her closet feeling strong and smart and wanting to look fantastic. She chose the skirt and a tight brown top and a black silk camisole, which was only just visible. She knew she looked great, but all of it was wasted on Guy. He sat down at his desk and barely even glanced at her.
“About Fred,” he said, looking at his computer screen.
“Yes,” Nicola began. She had given this a lot of thought on the muni this morning. “You know, I was thinking about what you said last Friday, and I agree, you should definitely sit in on the meeting.”
“Oh, I should?” Guy was surprised. “Why is that?”
“We could do a little good cop bad cop. I tell him the bad news, you tell him the good.”
“There’s good news?”
“I outlined it in that memo, the goNetURI solution.”
Guy was dismissive. “Oh right. Like I said on Friday, I don’t think that will work. Don’t waste your time.”
Nicola pulled her chair closer to Guy’s desk, then swiveled his computer so she could work on it. “I put up the test site this morning,” she said. “Watch.”
Images fell from the screen. Nicola clicked on one at random, and a new window opened.
“Huh,” Guy said.
“Just what Fred wanted. He’ll want to know how it worked, and as the good cop you can explain it. I put it all in my memo. Just spell it out in layman’s terms.”
“I didn’t get a memo,” Guy said.
“Here’s a copy.”
Guy looked it over. “Huh. Huh. Huh,” he said, frowning. “Okay. Well, since you got it working, okay, but it seems overly complicated.”
Nicola looked at him steadily. She was not afraid of him, not anymore. Had she really been afraid of him?
“Oh Fred loves that,” she said. “He likes to think he’s hiring rocket scientists to work exclusively on his site. Just explain it in detail.”
“Is that right,” Guy said. He was still looking at the memo. Then he looked at his computer screen. Awkwardly, he moved the mouse over and clicked one of the images.
“It seems to work,” he said.
“It’s beautiful,” Nicola told him. She shifted a little in her seat and pulled at her skirt. Guy looked down at her leg.
“But I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t I be the bad cop? That way you could explain all this in detail and as you do it you could flirt, smile with him a little. Remember how you were going to smile? Butter him up. Make him feel, you know, wanted.”
“Wanted?”
“Well just a little.” Guy smirked.
Nicola pretended to consider it. “We could do it that way,” she said.
“Good. Okay, then.”
“We could do it that way except for the obvious problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Fred’s gay.”
“He’s gay?”
Nicola smiled. “So really it should be you smiling and flirting.”
“Me?” Guy laughed. “Oh I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well why do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because I’m not gay!”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course it does! He won’t believe me. You should do it,” Guy said.
Nicola raised her eyebrows; this should be interesting, she thought.
“You’re the woman,” Guy explained, “so you should flirt. It’ll be more effective.”
“A woman flirting with a gay man is effective?”
“More believable, then.”
Nicola swung a little in her chair and looked pointedly at Guy. “So you’re saying it will be more believable if I flirt with someone whom I know does not desire me or anyone like me? Is that what you’re saying? It will work better if the one flirting is the one not desired? Is that what you’re saying?”
Guy looked down, then looked around the room. “Hunh,” he mumbled.
“Okay, then.”
“Well,” he said.
Nicola smiled. “So, okay.”
* * *
She took the meeting alone.
Fred walked in late, wearing the sour expression of a man who might bag groceries for a living; in fact, come to think of it, he did look a lot like the man who bagged Nicola’s groceries for her and who had once told her he was fertile every fourteen years. A come-on? Fred had a full red face and wore crumpled trousers and a shirt that always seemed to hang on him crookedly, like a flag at half mast. Probably, Nicola thought, he had never flirted with a woman in his life. He had one outstanding skill: he could slow a meeting down to a standstill.
But Nicola brought chocolate cookies to the table and every time there was a pause she fed another one to Fred. Meanwhile she talked and talked, and she said she understood his problems, and said she thought she could solve them, and she said here take another cookie while I explain something we’ve done that might help with that, and in the end Fred was on a vast happy sugar high and all the features Nicola particularly wanted stayed in. In fact, Fred even went so far as to promise the next check on time—a first, if he could be trusted.
“Thank you, Nicola,” Fred said at the elevator, and he held out his hand.
Had Fred ever thanked her before? As she walked down the hall to the bathroom she was smiling to herself. Unbelievable—a Monday that is better than a Friday. She’s got it, she sang to herself in the bathroom mirror. Yeah, baby, she’s got it. Nicola touched her face, trying to see herself in profile. Her hair looked great.
“Admit it, you get off on the pressure,” Audrey said to her later, when they went to pick up sandwiches for the team. It was cloudy out and cold and Nicola buttoned her leather jacket as they walked down the street.
“I’m not saying I don’t like a little adrenaline flow,” she admitted.
“Fred is your favorite customer because he puts up a good fight.”
“And today,” Nicola said, “I won. What could be better?”
They crossed the street quickly, their heads bent against the sudden gusts of wind. The rain started in a meagerly way, then stopped again, and a few homeless men sat on tarps on the sidewalk.
“I could never do what you do; it would make me too nervous,” Audrey said. “When things get tense I have to go outside so I can relax for a minute. And these days even that doesn’t help. I mean, look at it.” Audrey gestured around. The street did seem very bleak. It was gray and cold and the palm trees looked like great sad, hairy Dr. Seuss beasts bending in the wind. But Nicola herself felt great. How long had it been, three days since the kidnapping? Still, she felt completely different. Either it was real change or it wasn’t. Either she would go back to the way she had been, or she wouldn’t.
She stepped around a flower cart, thinking about Friday night. She had been tied up, she had been kidnapped, her purse had been taken from her and rifled through, and they had laughed at her hair. But through it all, strangely, she did not feel like a victim. She was a victim, but she didn’t feel like a victim. She knew one thing—now she was going to fight for what she wanted. She was going to fight, and she was going to fight hard. This wasn’t bravery; it was sanity.
“I have a fantasy that Declan and I quit all this and move in with my brother,” Audrey went on. “We could help him make his bamboo flutes.”
“Your brother makes a living making bamboo flutes?”
“And bamboo headjoints. He also tutors people on breaking them in; they have to be played in gradually and protected against sudden temperature changes. He advises rubbing the finger holes with edible oil.”
“Is this the brother who went to Princeton?” Nicola asked.
“Brian. But he’s trying to get his name changed legally to Yevgeny.”
Nicola laughed.
/> “I know, I know,” Audrey said. “But it would be nice to live right on the ocean.”
Nicola glanced at her. Her face looked suddenly wistful. They walked past the record store and the place with incredible fudge. A giant chocolate Santa stood in the store window.
Nicola said, “I wish I had just one friend who didn’t talk about leaving.”
Audrey looked away. “Oh, San Francisco is so overrated—the fog, the palm trees, the paint jobs. But go to McDonald’s and it looks just like anywhere else.”
“In Hawaii McDonald’s serves mahi mahi,” Nicola told her.
“Really?”
“Mahi mahi on a stick.”
They stepped into the café and out of habit Nicola looked around the room, but Chorizo wasn’t there. Well, she didn’t really expect to see him. She was sure he had been the man at that hotel, and, hey, you know what, she thought, he was probably there with some other woman. Actually, it surprised her that she hadn’t considered that before.
She thought about his birthmark, his smooth conversation. I must have been a disappointment, she thought. Not that she wanted Chorizo to ask her out again. Or maybe she did. Maybe she would like to play one man against the other—she was thinking of Lou. Nicola hoped she was not turning into someone like that, although she could see the attraction. No, she wanted something else with Chorizo: a chance to redeem herself. She didn’t know what exactly. Some kind of makeup test. Because she knew she would do it better this time around. She wouldn’t back down at the last minute out of fear or insecurity or whatever it was.
Their sandwiches came and Nicola handed the bags over to Audrey, then turned back to pay for them. It was then that she noticed the missing-girl sign taped to the counter.
“This is new,” she said.
“Just happened,” the owner told her. He was a dark, unfriendly man from some former Soviet State or another. He never showed any signs of recognizing her, although she had been coming here almost every day for two years. Nicola read the Xeroxed flyer. Missing: Melissa Snider, twenty-six years old, brown hair, brown eyes. Last seen at her place of work two blocks away. Nicola’s mouth puckered. Missing since Friday.
“Recognize her?” the owner asked, taking Nicola’s money.
Nicola looked at the picture again. “No.”
“She came in here a lot. Sweet girl.”
She glanced at him, but his sour expression remained. I could be the one on this sign, Nicola thought.
“Pretty,” Audrey commented.
“Always gives me correct change. None of this twenty-dollar bill for a cup of coffee business.” He looked at the bills Nicola gave him.
“Hey, it’s what the bank machine spits out,” she protested.
His expression didn’t change. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said wearily.
Out on the street Audrey shifted the bag of food to her other hand and said, “Creepy.”
“I agree,” Nicola said. She felt oddly shaken. The flyer seemed to represent something—a lesson or a warning or at least something too coincidental to ignore. The girl, Melissa Snider, had disappeared at about the same time the Daves were tying her up in the van. It could have been her face on the flyer if the Daves had been more competent. Or less.
“There’s something so sad about those missing-person flyers,” Audrey was saying. “Or those flyers you see about lost pets. You know they’ll never come back, although you can’t say they’re gone for sure.”
“Maybe they’ll come back,” Nicola said.
“Face it; it’s terrible here. I mean, look what happened to you!”
“But that was just Scooter.”
“The crime’s getting worse. I really want to get out of here and go someplace warm. Get out of the city.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” Nicola said. “I like where I am. I like my job, I like my home, I like my friends. And if anybody tries to take them away, any of them, I’ll fight them. Hard.”
“Really,” Audrey said. “And when did you get so testy?”
“Around midnight on Friday,” Nicola told her.
* * *
From across the street Chorizo watched Nicola and the other woman, thinking how awful they looked in the wind, their terrible postures, like weakened animals heading for shelter. Their jaws moved, but of course he could hear nothing. Not that he needed to, he knew it all—work complaints, last night’s sitcom, the price of lunch. Husbands or boyfriends. Landlords.
A muni rang its bell as it moved up the street toward the tunnel, cutting off his view. He walked in their direction anyway; he could tell they were in no hurry to get back to the office with their lunches in bags. Eating at their desks—another mistake. Bent over a keyboard. It’s bad enough, but when you’re digesting? Walking or sitting, how you carry yourself is important. He himself meditated every day in the standard lotus position. “Leave your body and dissolve. Now come back to your posture.” This had carried him through some rough times. The muni passed on, and there they were again with their buckling torsos. He recognized Nicola, of course, but not the young woman with her. He was sad for them, almost. It is so very important to synchronize body and mind.
At the corner the women stopped for a moment, still talking, then entered a building. He took out a pencil and wrote down the address and at that moment the cellular telephone in his pocket began to ring.
“Yes,” Chorizo said.
It was Robert.
“I’m in West Portal,” Robert told him.
Chorizo looked up the street. Robert was nowhere in sight. “Are you,” he said ironically.
“I’m checking up on that woman, Nicola.”
“All right.”
“The woman you wanted me to check up on.”
“All right.”
“And I checked every doctor’s office on the street, but I couldn’t find an employee named Nicola anywhere.”
“Excuse me?”
“What?”
“You went to doctors’ offices?” Chorizo asked.
“Yeah and there weren’t any Nicolas, but there was one Nicole. Could that have been her? At a podiatrist’s. Was it Nicole, do you think? Anyway I have the address.”
“I told you dentist, not doctor,” Chorizo said.
“What’s that?”
“She works at a dentist’s office, she works for a dentist. Oh, never mind. Just meet me back at the office.”
Chorizo turned off the phone and looked at his watch. Robert was such an idiot—really, he’d been hoping for more. Maybe he should spend more time with him, teach him not to be such a fool. Was Robert teachable? Chorizo crossed the street and looked in through the glass door of Nicola’s building. A shaft of sunlight cut through some tempered glass creating a momentary prism, and he was reminded of the second principle of Shambhala—Discover goodness by finding beauty in the everyday world. Chorizo took a moment to watch the prism as it floated lightly against the painted stucco wall.
Beauty in the everyday world.
Then he looked around the foyer. The women weren’t there. He entered the building and studied the office listings pinned by the elevator. A café on the ground floor. A design firm on the top floor. Two dentists in between. Chorizo smiled. She must work for one or the other. The spiritual warrior prevails, he thought, as he copied down the dentists’ names.
Eleven
“Go on, say it: You’re in my way!”
Nicola shifted her weight and kicked. Her foot reached sternum level. “You’re in my way!”
“Fighting stance!” shouted Alicia. “Left side forward, now bounce! Switch to the other foot! Bounce! Exercise your legs and heart, come on! Five more! Now switch! Two more! Now switch!”
The music turned into heavy bass beats and Nicola turned and began her cross punches. She was standing on the red wrinkled karate mats with twelve other women facing a wall of mirrors. The room was brightly lit and smelled slightly of foot fungus.
“Guard up!” shouted Alicia. “
Get a rhythm, come on! Tina, where’s your elbow? Nicola, very good!”
They finished their cross punches, practiced their obliques, then started the whole sequence over in double time. By the time they got to the snap kicks, Nicola felt sweat running down her temple and she could hear someone behind her start to groan.
“All set for handrail drills! Four count front, round, side kick!”
Nicola let her mind go blank as she copied Alicia’s movements. It was important to forget how tired you were. The karate mats felt thin beneath her feet and for a while she tried to imagine an opponent—her landlord? Guy?—but when she let go of specifics, her movements felt cleaner. Clear your mind, Alicia liked to say. Anyone could be an opponent. Nicola kicked the air, then jabbed with a closed fist. Her heart felt like a revved motor.
“Sideways, kick! You’re in my way!”
Nicola turned and kicked. She was mean and serious. During her match she practiced lateral movements, hitting, then stepping aside. Speed was the important factor. Alicia demonstrated a spinning back kick and Nicola thought, I want to do that.
After class she noticed Lou sitting on one of the spectator benches. She smiled at him as she walked over, surprised and glad to see him. He was wearing another white button-down shirt and his face looked recently shaved.
“I thought we were going to meet at the restaurant?” she asked.
He said, “I wanted to see how tough you California women really are.”
Nicola pulled her hair out of its ponytail. She was dripping with sweat.
“And what did you decide?”
“You have a vicious hook,” he told her.
He smiled at her. He had a great, slow smile. The surfer grin, Nicola thought. But his eyes were sharp, like a cat’s.
“Nicola,” Alicia said, coming up to her. Her forehead was clear and dry and her blonde ponytail was still perfectly in place. “Good work tonight. Very good. Have you been practicing?”
“You might say I’ve had a shift in attitude.”
“Well, your focus has really improved. You’re letting yourself empty out, which is great. Soon you can fill up the cup.” She touched Nicola’s shoulder, then moved on to another student.
“Fill up the cup?” Lou asked.
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