Fields Where They Lay, page 3
“No, just something quick,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”
He gave his full attention to shaking out his napkin and placing it on his lap. Without looking up, he said, “Change your plans.”
“Christmas,” I said. “You know?”
“I am aware of Christmas, certainly.” He smoothed the tablecloth with his palms. “Was that what you were asking?”
“I wasn’t actually asking anything,” I said. “The question mark, used that way, is usually intended to soften a bald and possibly rude statement of fact into the more polite form of a rhetorical question. N’est-ce pas?”
Poindexter blinked so slowly I could have counted to three. When he brought his eyes up to me, their near colorlessness had an unsettling effect, and he was obviously aware of it. “Whatever you have in mind,” he said, “you will clear the decks, is that the way to put it?”
“It’s one way.”
“Do you have a shopping list?”
“No,” I said. “I like to improvise.”
“Then improvise. Here and now. At this table. Make a list. For someone as spontaneous as you like to appear to be, that shouldn’t be too taxing. I will have everything bought and paid for by this evening.”
I said, “That won’t—”
“Wrapped, naturally. With cards. If you’ll give me a sample of your handwriting and a list of pet names—” He paused, pursing his lips. “Pet names? This is correct for people?”
I didn’t answer.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “With your handwriting and the names of your favorite people, I’ll have appropriate personal messages with a seasonal flair written in the cards.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I am being very polite to you,” he said. He put his forearms on the table and leaned toward me conspiratorially although no one was in earshot. “Trey says you are an asset worth cultivating.”
“Not a very personal recommendation, is it?”
“Trey is not a very personal individual. Nor am I.” He glanced down at his discreet bracelet and then used his other hand to buff it against his cuff. “But please. Let us do this in a friendly manner.” Poindexter raised his head and gave me a small, cold smile. “I have invited you here,” he said. “I am buying you lunch. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a much more pleasant way for me to proceed than by having someone collect your daughter when she gets out of her school in Tarzana at three and threaten to kill her.”
It was my turn to look down at the table. The firestorm of fury his words had kindled would have been visible from across the room. My ears were ringing from the leap in my blood pressure, and I decided to use that as my timer. When they stopped ringing, I’d look at him again.
“Ahh,” he said, “Lawrence,” and I sensed the presence of someone at my elbow, giving off a whiff of stale cigarette smoke.
“Mr. Poindexter,” the someone named, apparently, Lawrence, said. “Good to see you, sir. Happy holidays.”
“We were just talking, my friend and I,” Poindexter said, “about getting our shopping done.”
“Best part of the year, sir,” Lawrence said.
“I hope you’ve gotten some swell things for those beautiful children.” The word swell, even in the absence of an accent, would have told me that English wasn’t his original language.
“I try, sir. The membership’s generous holiday bonus makes it easier for all of us. Can I bring you something to drink?”
“Mineral water, room temperature, no ice. Mr. Bender?”
I had to clear my throat. “Coffee. Black.”
“Yes, sir.” The waiter had barely shifted his weight, hadn’t even lifted a foot yet, when Poindexter said, “Wait, Lawrence.” The tone was polite and final at the same time, a whip wrapped in silk.
Lawrence waited.
“I’d like the trout with a small green salad, no dressing.”
“Very good choice, sir. And you, sir?” he said, leaning in my direction.
“Just coffee.”
“Mr. Bender,” Poindexter said, “please take a moment to look at the menu.”
A long, glossy piece of cardboard appeared on the tablecloth in front of me. I pushed it aside and said, “Coffee.”
“But I am eating,” he said. “Please. The kitchen here is very good.”
“I’ll do what you need me to do,” I said, finally looking up at him and catching him in the stare of someone who is trying quite hard to read a muddled slop of tea leaves. He looked away instantly. “I’ll talk to you as long as I have to. But there’s no way in the whole wide fucking world I’ll eat with you. Coffee, Lawrence,” I repeated to the waiter, who had taken an involuntary step back. “Black.”
He was making something of a production of eating his trout, which was apparently unusually bony, even for trout. After a brief conversational skirmish, which his side won, we sat in a stony silence broken only by repeated interjections of “Excuse me,” as he extricated a tiny, sharp bone from his mouth and put it on the edge of his plate. I was occupying myself by taking apart the arrangement of ornaments on the table and putting them back in different configurations, currently the idiotic abstract of the “smiley,” the happy face that has refused for decades to relinquish its stranglehold on the hearts of the easily pleased.
He said, “So we are clear? You will go to my mall, introduce yourself to the so-called security staff, and discover why I am suddenly being robbed blind.” His Russian accent had found a crack in the wall and was asserting itself.
“Blind?” I said, turning the smiley into a frowny. “The kind of money you could lose through—what, shoplifting?—is small change to you. It’s practically a cost of doing business.”
His silence made me look up and then wish I hadn’t. His eyes had taken on a sort of fried egg effect, whites clearly visible all the way around the pale iris, and they were actually vibrating, doing a tiny left-right-left, back-and-forth thing so fast it had to be involuntary.
“Nobody,” he said, and stopped. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to them and then opened them again. “Nobody. Steals. From. Me. Nobody.”
“Got it.”
“Everybody has stock in trade, hmmm?” The Russian accent had claimed control of his tongue. “You, maybe, I don’t know, maybe you think is brains for you, you think you’re so smart.” He stopped and, with his mouth closed, swished air in and out between his teeth, making his lips protrude and recede quickly, the way mine might do when I use mouthwash. The eyes were now poached; some of the white was gone, but they were completely still. “For me, it is fear. Fear is what keeps me in business.” Aside from pronouncing “keeps” as kips, his English was reclaiming lost territory. “Do you know history?”
“Bits and pieces,” I said.
“The oh-so-civilized English, with the severed heads up on poles on the south entrance to London Bridge. Do you know about this?”
“Yes,” I said. “Most thieves remember that bit.”
“So did everyone who was alive then,” he said. He was almost shouting, and a few heads turned in our direction from the newly occupied tables. He sat back in his chair, smoothing the front of his blazer, his eyes still fixed on me. “So what this means is, first you find out who’s stealing from me and you tell me who it is, and second, until then you don’t tell anyone I hired you. I don’t want people even saying my name and stealing in the same sentence. You were hired, if you have to talk about it at all, by the Edgerton Partnership. Are we clear?”
“Clear.”
He blinked at last, and I had the sensation that I was on a plane that had just taken a big dip. I sat back in my chair, too.
“And third,” he said, “you succeed. Trey was very clear about this. She recommended you, she thinks highly of you in a minor way, but she doesn’t care if she never sees you again.” He looked down at his plate and shook his head. “Too many bones,” he said. He gave me the small, well-chilled smile again. “How was the coffee?”
4
Bric or Brac
Shoplifting was entirely outside my realm of my experience. I was completely disoriented. I felt large, I felt lumpen, I felt like I made noise every time I took a step inside the store I’d chosen as the scene of my impending crime. I felt like an amateur.
Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve probably stolen more things than most people own, but theft—the art of skilled theft, the kind of theft I’d trained for—is a solitary enterprise, carried out in the dark, in carefully chosen rooms, and silently, rather than under merciless fluorescents. Not to mention the incessant accompaniment of songs about snow and sleigh bells and merry old elves and being home for the holidays while I was stuck in this mall, two days away from the holiday in question, trying to learn a new way to steal.
I’d worked up my courage for the chore and surveyed the lay of the land by doing a circumnavigation of the mall on the second level. The circuit had taken me about twenty-one minutes. Most people take approximately that long to walk a mile, but I was weaving in and out of shoppers with their eyes on the bright windows and slowing frequently behind an adult or two with small children or groups of adolescent boys or girls (almost never together) who had lagged to appreciate the fine points of a gaggle of the opposite gender, so I wasn’t doing my usual pace. My best guess, by the time I got back to the escalator I’d taken down from Wally’s third-level surveillance room, was that the mall’s internal loop was a little less than half a mile. With three levels, that meant a bit more than a mile’s worth of storefront, given the commercial dead space lost to entrances, exits, eating areas, escalators, elevators, stairways, restrooms, and other unprofitable necessities.
The experience was mildly informative, but it was time to stop stalling. Feeling as big and as conspicuous as a lighthouse, I had made a hurried choice from the shops closest to me and gone into Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac.
The term bric-a-brac leaked into the English language in the nineteenth century as an approximation of a sixteenth-century French phrase, à bric et à brac, meaning something like any old way, disordered, random. Random certainly applied to the phrase as defined by Bonnie, who used it to encompass absolutely anything small, fey, bright, and useless. Little gnomes and leprechauns clustered on two shelves beneath a shelf full of oddly shaped coffee mugs, spice grinders, and fancy plates with pictures on them. Elsewhere I saw mummified-looking artificial flowers, little ceramic houses that seemed vaguely Dutch, shiny plaster toadstools, miniature wishing wells, trivets, and hand-embroidered potholders that said Ssssssmokin’! and Hot Stuff! Whole corners were devoted to purportedly collectable figurines of animals that, I supposed, were high on the list of animals that people collect figurines of: owls, turtles, dogs, the ever-popular black-and-white Holstein cows, and a great many pigs.
I’d chosen the store because the merchandise was small and theoretically easy to boost, and because the place was surprisingly full, more so than the stuff in the window suggested it would be. When I got inside, I saw one reason why there might have been so many customers. The entire back wall was given over to unusual Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and cards, and a huge sign that read boxes for everything. Some of the paper, especially large, flat sheets based on Japanese woodblock prints and magnified Impressionist brushstrokes, looked interesting, but I was there on business.
I wandered off into a relatively uncrowded area full of either bric or brac, in this case kaleidoscopes made in China, bulbous throw pillows, miniature wooden shoes (who buys this stuff?) and framed prints of avowedly comic scenes, dominated by several of the famous series of dogs playing poker. These were originally painted as advertisements by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge around the turn of the twentieth century, and about ten years ago, a pair of the originals sold at auction for almost $600,000, which had led me to revise my criteria for kitsch. Positioned in front of the prints, translating a bad idea into three dimensions, were little ceramic figurines of the dogs from the paintings. I looked around and found no one’s eyes on me, so I picked up the nearest one, a bulldog with a cigar clutched in its teeth, and slipped it into my pocket.
Then it happened.
My nerve utterly failed me. Me—the consummately professional master thief, the never-arrested star protégé of the greatest burglar in San Fernando Valley history. Me, the guy who’d stolen the most expensive modern stamp on earth from a professional killer—you know, that me. Faced with shoplifting a discounted porcelain dog, I froze. I stood there, a charmless, worthless purloined china dog in my pocket, unable to force myself to take a step.
I scanned the store again for a slow count of ten, my fingers interlocked on top of my head, where they couldn’t possibly be doing anything suspicious, the dog feeling bigger than a watermelon in my pocket. Then, eyes everywhere, I browsed several more shelves full of Bonnie’s bric-a-brac for form’s sake, inhaled deeply, and headed for the door.
Which set off an alarm. It went dwoik, dwoik, dwoik at a frequency that pierced eardrums like a red-hot wire, and through it I heard someone say, “Sir?” and turned to see, looking at me with the kind of disappointment I inspired so often as a child, an adorable, harmless, trusting, merry-faced little dumpling of a woman who wore gift wrap ribbon woven gaily into her hair and a green and white dress and whose name tag read bonnie.
“We’ve only got one door,” Bonnie said. We were sitting side by side in the back of the shop, sipping a hot mixture of gallon-bottle red wine, hard cider, cinnamon, and cloves, which tasted less ghastly than it sounds. “The bigger shops have two, and I probably shouldn’t tell you this since you’re pretending to be a thief—” She laughed merrily; she’d talked to Wally on the phone, and whatever he’d told her, I saw no reason to contradict it. “Not that you’ve got any talent at it.” She laughed again, hit her wine again, pretty much emptying the cup, took the lid off a slow cooker plugged into the wall, and ladled herself some more. “Stay honest,” she said. “You turn to a life of crime and you’ll be on public assistance in no time. And listen, if you do want to try it again, don’t do it upstairs in old Sam’s.” She checked the new level in the cup. It was her third cup since we’d sat down.
“Sam who?”
“Saddle store, no, saddlery. Sam’s okay, but shoplifting makes him crazy.” She squinted like someone trying to find the trail she’d been following. “So,” she said happily, “what was I saying?”
“Something you shouldn’t tell me because I’m a thief.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, elbowing me. It might have been the first time I was actually elbowed. “So most of the bigger stores, the ones I was telling you about?” Her eyes narrowed and roamed the shop as though it were an unexpected cloud formation. “Bigger stores, bigger stores, what was it I was saying about them, the bigger stores?”
“They have two doors,” I said.
“I knew that. Well, one of the alarm doodads is usually a dummy. Things cost the earth, so they buy one that works and one that’s a phony, just a prop, you know?”
I said I had grasped the concept.
“And they set off the one that works every now and then to remind people what they’re for.”
“Saints alive,” I said.
“And then there’s the stores with three doors,” she said, still warming to the topic. She pointed at her own door and said, “One,” then pointed at the middle of her window and said, “two,” and then at the opposite corner. “Three. Got it? You have to imagine them, the doors. Except for that one, I mean, the one that’s really there. So.” She closed her eyes and scratched the tip of her nose, evidently seeking the thread again, then opened her eyes and said, “So like I just said, entrance over there, takes you right into the merchandise, and then there’s two exits, both near the cash registers. Come in, see the stuff, pay for the stuff, leave. The merchant loop, they call it. No one alarms their entrance, and remember, one of the two alarm doodads is a fake. So that’s two doors without an alarm.”
“And the really big stores? Boots to Suits and whatever used to be on the other end?”
“You’d think they’d have a million entrances, wouldn’t you? But here’s a s’prise. They’ve only got one—or maybe three or four, but they’re all nexta each other, at the end that opens into the mall. They’re not allowed to have private entrances, ’cause the whole thing about a mall is that you gotta pass other stores to get to the one you want. Hic.”
I said, “Was that an actual hiccup?”
“What do you think, I’m practicing?” She knocked back what could be accurately described as a gulp. “You think anyone in the whole history of everyone has ever practiced a hiccup?”
“Not often,” I conceded. I looked up, surprised to see that the crowd had thinned considerably in the short time we’d been talking. “Where is everybody?”
“They come, they go,” she said. “It’s like fishing. Gotta hook ’em while they’re there. So the big stores like Boots to Suits and Gabriel’s—”
“Gabriel’s?”
“S’what useta be at the ghost town end of the mall, where the little booths are now. The bazaar, they call it. Although it’s more of a swap meet. Anyway, the big stores, like I said, you could only go in and out in one place on each floor, where they had a whole buncha doors right next to each other and, see, they didn’t want to put alarms there ’cause they kept getting the old woo-woo-woo when somebody walked in with something they stole in another store. And, you know, just ’cause someone swiped something someplace else, that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna buy something from you. Right?”
“You guys have to pay for the alarm system?”
“We buy the doodads,” she said. “The thingies in the door. Mall pays the subscription or whatever it is to keep them working and up-to-date. And they also pay for the whatzit, the security staff, like that poor, dim little Wally. Jeez, I keep thinking we’ll lose him to melanoma, especially with the way his hair’s receding. It’s like he leaves a trail of red hair behind him. The skin on top of the head is—”
