Base Notes, page 11
But there was also an increasing buzz of anxiety, the knowledge that soon I would have to tell Jane about Pip Miles, a problem that had so far only simmered on the back burner of my to-do list.
Noon crept up on me, and I realized I had never called Eisner back. Well, let him live in suspense awhile longer. Maybe it would teach him a little bit of empathy.
“In the neighborhood” for Eisner meant a very different Lower East Side. I could have taken a cab and been there in five minutes, but the bus was cheaper and satisfied my spiteful streak. Let him sit and wait and drink another spritz while the M15 stop-started up Allen Street.
The address was a private club where there didn’t seem to be a written list, but the woman at the door still knew my name. Eisner sat in a corner of the dining room, sunk low in a champagne velvet chair shaped like an abstract clamshell, a half-eaten Peking duck breast on the table in front of him. He had not been drinking a spritz, after all: a bottle of chenin blanc chilled in a bucket at his elbow.
I sat down opposite. There was not a second glass or setting.
“Did you walk?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “There was traffic.”
“Hm.” He sipped his wine, then seemed to notice my empty half of the table. “I’m sorry, would you like some?”
“No, thank you.” I leaned back in my own velvet clamshell and crossed my arms. “What is it you wanted to talk about?”
“I thought we could have a little status meeting,” he said, slicing a bite from his duck breast and examining its perfect pink muscle fibers. “Just to catch up on your progress.”
“Of course.” I waited for him to say more, but unfortunately he was waiting for me to do the same. And he had the benefit of his lunch to keep him busy.
“I’ve been experimenting with a few methods,” I said. Thanks to the preceding silence, it came out awkwardly. “And making some progress.” Progress in elimination, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Do you have an ETA?”
“It’s a complicated process.”
He raised an eyebrow, fork hanging in the air. I stared back, stone-faced, and he seemed to come to some resolution on his own. In went the duck, and he began to chew.
“You know, Vic . . .” He had a confident man’s ability to talk with his mouth full, hand half raised to his lips in a gesture toward better manners. Like he knew what he ought to do, but also knew he didn’t have to do it.
“What?” I asked, shoving it into his thoughtful pause.
He swallowed and looked sour. “I am operating on a timetable. Corporate machines move slowly, but they do move. If we don’t execute this soon, we might lose our chance.”
I disliked “we.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m cognizant of that. I’m operating on a timetable as well.” I hadn’t meant to tell him this yet, if at all—I had almost hoped to end the issue before bringing it to his attention. But sometimes pettiness is its own reward. “I’m afraid murder investigations move more quickly than boardroom politics.”
It was so satisfying to see him blanch. To set his wine aside because his hand had suddenly gone weak.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a little dramatic. He doesn’t know it’s murder yet. He’s calling it a ‘disappearance.’”
“Who?” Eisner’s voice was hoarse. I wondered if he’d sucked a little duck down the wrong tube.
“A private investigator named Pippin Miles.” If he was going to haunt my waking moments, he could be put to use. Let him haunt Eisner as well.
“Not the police.”
“Not yet.” I let the emphasis fall heavily on the second syllable. “I’m not even sure who hired him, but he’s looking into my last commission.”
“Shit.” He put his gray face into one bony hand. I caught the waiter’s eye and lifted Eisner’s glass, pointing to it. When an empty glass arrived, I served myself from the bottle of chenin blanc. It was passable, but paled in comparison to Sunday’s vermentino in every way but price. The markup on a mediocre bottle here was probably outrageous.
“You might want to talk to Conrad,” I said. “Or even better, talk to Reg. He’s the one who couldn’t keep his mouth shut when this PI came around.”
Eisner’s pallor flushed to an angry red. “Of course he couldn’t.”
“I didn’t think it was smart,” I said, “leaving him out of the loop, but Conrad wouldn’t hear it. And the customer is always right. Isn’t that what they say?”
Our waiter appeared at my side. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Just the check, I think.” I smiled at him, broadly. When he’d gone I finished my wine and stood.
“Joseph,” I said, and gave Eisner a nod. “Updates as they come.”
He didn’t even turn his head.
I only felt victorious until Eisner was out of sight. Back on the street, I realized I had won nothing. Miles was still a threat, and I wasn’t off the hook for the commission either—in fact, Eisner was going to ride me harder than ever.
And I still didn’t have a clue how to make the damn thing. Three deaths were necessary to satisfy the first half of Eisner’s commission. But if it was just murder for hire, he wouldn’t have come to me. The perfume was the important part. The part that only I could do—we hoped.
It was two o’clock. There was a lot of work to complete in the lab if we wanted to be ready to ship out our first Clairfield & Amos order on time. But I knew as soon as I was back in that clean white basement, surrounded by bottles and jars and beakers and oil, I would only be able to think about Eisner’s impossible commission. And Pip Miles. And many other things conspiring to make my life difficult.
It had begun to rain—no, sleet. I slid into a painfully hip coffee place, ordered a single-origin something or other, and settled into an uncomfortable midcentury modern armchair. To Barry and Leila, I texted instructions and productivity targets for the rest of the day, fully expecting they would close up early instead. Barry replied with a middle-finger emoji.
What to do? Head home and tinker? With what? I was out of ideas. If I embarked on any more experiments, I would just be wasting materials, money, and time. I was afraid, also, to find that blue windbreaker lingering on my doorstep again. As if by invoking Miles with Eisner, I might have summoned him. Name the devil, after all, and the devil will appear.
The espresso was very good, which I found obscurely annoying. I drank it quickly and was left with nothing to do except stare at my phone, like everyone else in the place. So much for the NO LAPTOPS sign above the register.
I didn’t have my own Instagram account—what on earth would I post?—but we did run one for the company. Listlessly, I nudged my finger past notifications until a comment caught my eye. On an old post, of a bottle that had been new six months ago. Sevilen, it was called. Barry, again; I had completely forgotten the name. Bitter almonds and Aleppo pepper. Cumin. Turkish rose.
I recognize this one.
Just as I recognized the profile picture. Even writ small, I could see the point of Jane’s stubborn chin, the shaggy sweep of her hair: her face in shorthand. I clicked through, looked at a few pictures of architecture, the abstract play of light and shadow in unlikely places. She didn’t post often, but they were beautiful photos. And not what I would have expected. She was wasted behind a bar, and she would be wasted behind an X-ray machine as well. At least that was a type of photography. Small compensation.
I opened a text, then realized that I didn’t have her number. I could ask Beau, but that felt juvenile. An Instagram message, then, though I hated to do it from the company account. So tacky, and Barry would see. Not that I minded his knowing, only his asking.
Still . . .
I recognize THIS one, I sent. And then, why not, a winky face. I immediately regretted it. Was I twelve?
I didn’t expect a reply—if she wasn’t working, surely she was in class or rotations or whatever it was they asked of radiology technicians-to-be. But before I even closed the app my phone buzzed in my hand.
Good eye.
Better nose, I said, and sent my number.
No flirting on the company account? The text preview dropped down above our previous conversation. I swiped over. What are you up to? asked her second text.
The grinder growled into life behind me, rising to a shriek.
Coffee, I said. You?
Library.
Where?
She dropped a pin. To my surprise she was uptown, at City College. Not a ten-minute walk from my apartment.
What are you doing up there?
Studying. Needed a change of scenery.
You’re near my place, I said.
Is this a booty call?
I laughed. The freelancer next to me looked up owlishly from her iPad. It can be. Then, losing my laughter: Actually, I need to talk to you about some things.
There was a very long pause I could not interpret. Then, Bring me coffee, she said. And after a pause just long enough to turn her manners into mockery: Please.
11
Notes de Tête: Coffee, Dead Leaves, and Wet Pavement
Notes de Cœur: Jasmine, Unwashed Hair
Notes de Fond: Cèpes, Sichuan Pepper
“This is cold,” said Jane an hour later, wrinkling her nose. It had an upturned tip: adorably retroussé. Her dishevelment was somehow chic and Continental. Unwashed hair barely held back, pins slipping. Long white throat above a boatneck sweater. Sweat smell.
“Well, I brought it all the way from Houston Street.” I sat beside her, leaned in to look at her textbook. Passages highlighted, key words copied out with bullet points in her notes. I understood none of it.
“What? Why?”
“I was getting coffee in the Lower East Side,” I said, flipping the page to a blurry gray-and-white image the caption said was a renal cyst. Charming. “That’s where my lab is.”
“And you came all the way up here? I thought you lived—”
“I do. I left work early.”
“Because you need to talk about some things.” She shook her head and closed her book. “I fuck you once and you’re already getting needy.”
“So fuck me again,” I said, and the undergrad across the table looked up in interest. I cast them a look of disgusted disdain. They looked down again. Turning back to Jane, I caught the tail end of the glare she had aimed in the same direction.
“Fuck me again,” I said once more, “and then we’ll talk. I’m not needy. It’s important.”
I hadn’t meant to change my tone of voice, but I heard it lose the lightness of flirtation. Jane watched me from beneath lowered lashes, sultry and skeptical. “All right. You can take me back to your place and ask me up for coffee. Fresh coffee.”
“I live in a basement,” I said.
She threw her textbook into her purse. “So ask me down.”
It occurred to me, vaguely, that my apartment was not as nice as hers. But she had Beau’s income as well as her own—she would understand. I had done well with what I had, and it was better than some people’s places. Clean, for one thing, if a little damp.
The sleet had evanesced into a chill mist, and though it was a cold walk up Convent it was beautiful: the trees holding aloft a gauzy gray canopy of cloud, all the old houses soft at the edges like the world was smeared in Vaseline. It felt as though we weren’t in the city at all but in some genteel university town or old European capital.
The illusion was briefly marred by our crossing 145th: traffic honking, hydraulics on a bus, the screams of an ambulance headed to the Bronx. Delivery bikes sped past, electric engines whining. I smelled gasoline and burnt rubber, smoke from the kitchen of the Mexican restaurant down the block. As we waited for the light to change, the backs of our hands brushed. I heard Jane’s breath catch. It turned to steam and disappeared into the fog.
In this weather, even Iolanda’s shabby brownstone looked romantic. Victorian. Gothic. I carefully went down the steps to the exterior basement door: the servants’ entrance, long ago. Dead vines curled over the stone archway below the front stairs. I struggled with the dead bolt for a moment. I didn’t usually come in this way—only when I didn’t want Iolanda to ask questions. Such as when I had company in tow. Or a corpse.
Once the door opened, I called up to Jane: “Careful of the ice.” Still, she nearly slipped on the last step and reached out for my shoulder. Under the dead ivy and the sweating stones, the cold smells of still water and moldering leaves, she was close and warm and she pressed me to the wall and kissed me.
Coffee breath and the powdery smell of dry shampoo. I buried my nose in the fold of skin beneath her ear, displacing bobby pins. Her hair fell against my cheek.
My hands found her waist, pushed her gently past the threshold into the dark of the basement. Into my workshop. She didn’t know the shapes of the shadows as intimately as I did. I wondered what she would think if she understood what we stood amongst. She had already surprised me once, twice, more than I expected. And she was surprising me again, right now, suddenly rough and urgent.
“Wait, wait,” I said. Without turning on the bare bulb overhead, I found my door and unlocked it. Blue, misty light from the window bathed the whitewashed walls, the hastily made single bed. It still smelled of this morning’s scorched moka pot, hovering over ever-present mildew.
“It’s small,” I said. “I don’t usually have company.”
She shrugged and pulled the door shut behind her.
Without Beau, everything was different. Not better or worse. All right, maybe a little better. Three people, especially the first time around, can make things awkward. Even when you’re the focus of all the attention.
Now I had Jane herself, unadulterated. And she had me. It was like an ungrounded current, steel sparking against steel. There was no buffer for our egos, no go-between who could absorb the punishment we meted out and beg for more. This was a tournament of wills; an endurance contest.
Had I not wished for someone to snarl at, who would snarl right back at me? For a stone to whet my edge? I felt scraped by her sharp edges. I would have bruises in the morning. Bite marks. Cuts. So would she.
I wanted to win, but an hour later I came with two of her fingers curled inside of me. I didn’t cry out—I had never given Jonathan the satisfaction, so why should I give it to anyone else?
My only consolation was that I felt her surrender shortly after: the helpless grasp of orgasm closing around my hand. Relentless, I made her come again, and then a third and final time. We both stopped fighting and fell back, out of breath.
“Fuck,” she said, and burst into laughter. I thought of frozen peas spilled across the floor, prosecco poured into a pan of custard, the repetitive scrape of a whisk against steel. The parts of me that were not already limp relaxed into the sound of her pleasure.
“Coffee?” I asked, and her laughter redoubled. “I promised!”
“Fine,” she said, “fine. God.” She took my whole ear into her mouth and bit it, gently, then kissed my cheek.
I stood—dizzy, parched—and dumped the morning’s grounds into the trash. Lounging naked against the refrigerator while the water heated up, I looked at Jane. Her eyes flicked around the room, lighting on the bathroom door—ajar—and then the high window with its grate. The beaten rococo armchair bought from Housing Works. The bookshelf, and the books: one row, two, then three. She was cataloging my little life, drawing some conclusion from its details and trappings. I turned away, suddenly embarrassed, and busied myself with cleaning spilled coffee grounds off the Formica counter.
When I brought her a cup—spoonful of sugar, but no milk—she sipped and then said, “You wanted to talk.”
With a small sigh, I settled onto the bed so our legs lay hip to ankle, knee to knee. She put one of hers over mine, and her stubble pricked my skin. She smelled even better now: warm with the scent of sex like soft green hay, horsey and vegetal.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”
I put a hand on her shin and squeezed, the ridge of her tibia pressing into the soft place between my thumb and forefinger. “No,” I said. “That’s all right. Thank you for bringing me back down to earth.”
“You said it was important.” She spoke with her lips against the rim of her cup, blowing the words across the coffee to cool it.
“Reg has been talking to a private detective.” At the sound of his name I felt her freeze. The ripple of her breath on the surface of her coffee stilled. I had wanted to upset Eisner with the revelation, but I was loath to upset Jane. I almost regretted telling her, but I had only meant to keep this secret until she felt safe. She knew what I was, but she was in my bed, bare skin beneath my hand. I had no excuse.
“Shit,” she said at last. “About you?”
I shook my head, then let the negation lapse into a shrug. “Not in the way you’re imagining. But it hasn’t exactly been helpful either.”
“What did he say?”
I drank my coffee, which was too strong and smelled slightly burnt. I was no barista. “He mentioned I had done some work for his father, around the time his mother disappeared.”
“You killed her,” said Jane.
I nodded.
“Why?” she asked. “I mean, why did he want you to do it? What memory did he want?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve gotten clients like this before, who misunderstand the primary importance of what I offer. Who want a nuisance dead, perfume or not.”
My clients generally came to me with an understanding of what my art required. If they didn’t already suspect, I rarely worked with them. You want a special kind of client in a field like mine: one who’s quick on the uptake and understands discretion. Few were troubled by the deaths their perfumes required—indeed, for people like Eisner they were a perk, or part and parcel.
“I usually turn them away if they’re after an assassin,” I said. “But . . . well, he could pay. Don’t tell me you’ve never gritted your teeth and taken the money.”
