Fields Where They Lay, page 8
“It’s rare these days,” she said, “to find a man who’s so considerate,” and my phone rang.
“What?” I said into the mouthpiece.
“You must letting me finish,” he said. “This man, he is garbage. I send him, yes, to see where you live because is Christmas and I, I, I, I want, I want to send you, for, for Christmas . . .”
He trailed off, and then he laughed, and I laughed, too. It was too stupid not to laugh. Francie DuBois’s eyebrows went up.
“Where is he?” Vlad asked.
“Downtown cops got him. He ran a stop sign and collided with a patrol car while he was carrying a gun and driving a car with bullet holes in it. They’re going to want to chat with him for a while. Who knows, maybe he’ll lead them to you.”
“Peh,” he said. “He knows nothing.” And then, sounding more like Tip Poindexter, he said, “It would seem to me that you came off quite well.”
“No thanks to you.”
“So you are downtown?”
“Downtown is a big place. Oh, and find somebody else to protect your mall. Right out of the Great Depression, by the way.”
“I am actually glad this happened,” he said. “I have been rethinking our arrangement. Threats are so primitive. And a man like you, I should have a relationship with a man like—”
“Fifty thousand dollars,” I said. I felt Francie DuBois’s eyes on me, and when I looked over, she nodded approval. “And I want twenty-five tomorrow, no bills bigger than a twenty, and twenty-five more the same way when I give you the name or names.”
“You are getting anywhere?”
“For free?” I said. “You must be kidding. Twenty-five tomorrow at the mall, twenty-five when I’m done.”
A pause. For all I knew, he was taking his pulse. “Where at the mall?”
“Eleven a.m. Phone me when you’re in the parking lot, and I’ll tell you where to come.”
“Trust is important in a business—”
I said, “Tell me about it. If I don’t see you by ten after eleven, I’ll be gone.” I hung up and found Francie DuBois looking at me appraisingly.
She said, “Fastest I ever saw anyone go from zero to fifty.”
“He’ll still kill me if he gets the chance,” I said. I’d just hung up on Louie, who had promised to find a shooter who was in between jobs and get him or her out to Kathy’s block within an hour. In the morning, we’d set up a rotating schedule.
“Oh, well,” she said. “It’ll keep you on your toes. Men who are half-asleep have no magnetism.” She was plowing through an enormous plate of bibimbap, an adventurous mix of rice, meat, and vegetables topped with a raw egg. I was digging into kimchi and had some sliced rib eye and bits of marinated chicken grilling on the charcoal burner in the center of the table, making a column of fragrant smoke that the smoke hood above us was doing it best to blow back down. She tugged at the front of her blouse, sniffed it, and said, “I was tired of this thing anyway.”
I got busy tending to the meat for a moment or two, a little taken aback by how much I was enjoying myself. It had been a long time since I’d had dinner with an attractive woman I didn’t already know, and it felt good. On the other hand, my conscience reminded me, there was a splendid woman, bright, funny, tough, and mysterious, waiting for me in Apartment 302 of the Wedgwood. So how good it felt made it also feel a little bit bad, if that makes sense.
“Well,” I said, trying to keep things safely neutral, “how did you happen to be driving around Koreatown, strapped and loaded, in one of Louie’s emergency cars?”
“I wish it were interesting,” she said. “I was Christmas shopping and my car is in the shop, so I borrowed, or I suppose rented, one of his.”
“Shopping for whom?”
She didn’t let the smile get any lower than her eyes. “Acquaintances, people I know, people I owe. The milkman, the plumber, big Judd down at the service station. The usual mix.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Ah, indeed. The gun, which soothes me by its proximity, was in the trunk, where it’s supposed to be if it’s registered to me, which it is.”
“You’re registered to own a gun?”
She smiled more openly this time, not a hundred-watt smile, just a little glimmer of friendliness-plus. “One of me is,” she said.
The meat was all turned over, so I had no alternative but to look at her, which was a pleasant thing to do. “How many of you are there?”
“Two really solid mes,” she said, “by which I mean they might get past Homeland Security if they were having a bad day, and three so-so mes, good enough for the LAPD, like you’ve probably got half a dozen of yourself.”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” I said. “We’ll compare. Are you really Francie DuBois?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“You have the advantage of me, then, since I really am Junior Bender.”
“I’ll take any advantage I can get,” she said. She gave her attention to the grill. “Those things ready?”
I picked up the tongs and checked the beef, which was done, and the chicken, which needed a minute or two. “Who are you really, then?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said.
“Right.” I put some of the meat on a plate along with a few of the roasting cloves of garlic and handed it across the table.
Sprinkling and slathering various condiments over a leaf of romaine, she said, “Tell you one thing, though. Whatever you’ve done for Louie, you made a friend out of him. I mean, here I am, peacefully driving home with a bunch of presents in the back of the car, and he’s suddenly on the phone, practically shouting, building a big case why I should drop everything, get my gun, and go get shot for some perfect stranger.” She wrapped the lettuce and spices around the barbecued beef like an Asian taco.
“I’m not all that perfect,” I said, dishing out some chicken.
“That was my first thought when I saw you.” She took a bite, and her eyes drooped closed in what looked like ecstasy. Women recover from ecstasy faster than men do, though, and a second later she was saying, “But I’ll tell you.” She cleared the food to one side of her mouth in order to talk. “You’re close enough that if you were standing in a department store window, I’d probably go shopping.”
I could feel myself blush. Blushing is a gigantic tell, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I said, “There’s a reason Louie likes me. It’s because a long time ago, I got his koala bear back for him.”
She rested her chin on her hand. There was no wedding ring on it. “Do I want to hear this story?”
The curve of her hand beneath her chin made me wish I could draw. “I’m not even sure I want to tell it.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “We’re here.” And she dug into the food again.
“The guy who’s my fence has a sideline in smuggling. He’s got runners who come through customs wearing fake bellies and inside the bellies are diamonds or gold or exotic animals. Four or five guys on each flight or at each border checkpoint to reduce the odds, not exactly top-line talent because who’d volunteer for this in the first place, and also they’ve got to be guys you can replace because some of them are going to get caught.” I paused.
“I actually am following you,” she said, chewing. “I’ll signal when I get overwhelmed.”
“One month, Stinky had been bringing in precious stones, mostly jade but also a couple of emeralds from Myanmar via Australia, which is the usual route for jade, and he had his guys pick up some koala bears, since, uh—”
“Since Australia,” she said.
“Yeah. So he found himself with a surplus of koala bears. Too many koala bears lowers the profit margins, not just due to supply and demand since the supply of koala bears rarely gets out of hand, but because they have to be fed and cared for, and some of them eventually die. I saw some of the leftovers up at my fence’s place, and I told Louie about it, and he bought one. Got it at a good price because my fence was sick of it. He and his wife—Louie and his wife, I mean—went all ootsie pootsie about it—”
“Ootsie pootsie.”
“You know, baby talk about how cute it was, how iddy biddy widdy it was, how they loved it more than candy, which is saying quite a lot for both of them. There was a week or so there when Louie was calling me up all the time with the latest lovable koala story. I guess this thing filled a gap or something. And then one day Alice came home, probably from a run to Pet Mart, and the bear was gone, cage and all.”
“Heartbreaking,” she said. “Could I get some more chicken?”
“Louie called me, since I was the only almost-detective he knew. Could I get it back, how long would it take, it was breaking Alice’s heart—”
“Blame it on the woman,” she said, putting together another Korean lettuce taco.
“Well, Louie’s not gonna tell me he’s having a nervous breakdown over a koala . . . you’re right, blame the woman. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly a brain-buster. It had to be someone who knew something about Louie’s house because he either had a key or the right picks for the back door and there was no sign of a search, and he probably also knew Stinky.”
“What a colorful name.”
“My fence. His family invented the perfume strip. So it took me about thirty-six hours to locate the guy who took the bear, a cousin of Alice’s, in a motel a couple of miles away. When I picked the lock, he was dead on the floor, and there had been a dim-witted attempt to roll him under the bed. But the really interesting thing was that every single horizontal surface in the apartment—floors, counters, the seats of chairs—had been covered with newspaper. And the newspaper had been well used by the koala bear.”
“The koala ate something,” she said. “Something it couldn’t digest. And the muscle was waiting for whatever it was to reemerge into daylight.”
I nodded. “The idiot with the false belly had also been carrying some of those Myanmar jewels, and like the dolt he was, he put them in a leather drawstring bag. The koala, with nothing to do during the flight—nobody sitting next to him, nothing to read, couldn’t see the video—he chewed through the bag and swallowed a twelve-carat emerald, almost perfect.”
“What’s almost?” She rested her chin on her palm, leaning toward me slightly.
I settled back in my chair, putting more space between us. “Emeralds tend to have more inclusions, usually little gas bubbles, than diamonds and sapphires do. Most people who know jewels look for the inclusions to prove it’s actually an emerald. So a ‘perfect’ emerald is one that has a teeny inclusion, just big enough to whisper, ‘Hey, I’m real.’ And that makes it hard to cut big stones because the bigger the stone the more inclusions you run into, so the per-carat price of a big, good emerald is a lot higher than the price of a small one. This stone was Triple-A rated, deep green, high transparency, and worth about a quarter of a million dollars. I went up to Stinky’s place and got the koala bear back, but he kept the emerald.”
“I didn’t know emeralds came from Myanmar.”
“They don’t, not much, but it’s a good place to get them cut without any embarrassing records being kept.”
“Who killed the cousin?”
“Hired muscle. The cousin had fed the poor little thing laxatives on a hunch, and when he saw what finally came out, he tried to hold Stinky up, and Stinky, well, he protected his interests. Anyway, I took the bear back to Louie and Alice once it got control of its digestive system again, and we’ve been friends ever since.”
“It’s not often,” she said, “that a charming stranger tells a girl a story with smuggling, fake bellies, emeralds, koala bears, and laxatives in it, all at once like that. Four of the five, sure, but all of them? How’s the bear?”
“In the LA zoo,” I said. “They got tired of him.”
A waitress shaped roughly like the Rock of Gibraltar was suddenly beside our table, so perhaps I was a bit less alert than usual. Without a word she picked up the large brown bottle of OB beer in front of me, sighted through it, and said, “One more?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Lady?” the waitress inquired, tossing her head in Francie’s direction.
“Doesn’t it show?” Francie said. “Oh, you mean my beer. No, I’m doing fine.” She spoke the last three words to the air because the waitress had turned away at “no.” “Efficient, isn’t she?”
I finished the bottle. “Your turn. What do you do when you’re not rescuing imperfect strangers?”
“I’m sort of a travel agent.”
“What sort of a travel agent? How many kinds are there?”
“I specialize in invisible itineraries,” she said. “Let’s say that heavy you were yelling at on the phone decides to kill you—”
“That’s about a fifty-fifty—”
She stopped me with a raised palm. “Don’t jinx it. Anyway, I’m being hypothetical here. You might talk to Louie, and Louie might talk to me, and I might build for you a sort of wormhole, like the ones the Enterprise was always going through, but without the engineer saying ‘She cannae take it, Cap’n.’” She shook her head. “How many thousand times do you think Scotty said that? And he was never right, not even once, but he retained his credibility because it was TV. On a real spaceship, the whole crew would be imitating his accent. Someone puts an extra potato on a plate and ten people would say in unison, ‘She cannae take it, Cap’n.’”
I said, “You’ve given this some thought.”
Francie let her gaze drift down to her food. “Where was I?”
“Building me a wormhole.”
“Right, scooting you out of peril. It would involve various modes of private and public transportation, odd departure times, a bunch of obscure places good only for passing through, several identities, some simple disguises, and possibly a visit to a plastic surgeon. Presto. When it was over, no one would be able to find you.”
“Except for you, which is the weak spot in the operation.”
“If they learn I made you disappear, they come to me and I resist bravely and they slap me around a little and maybe punch me, and then I cave in and reluctantly show them everything: your itinerary, your tickets, a picture of your fake passport and also your other fake passport, even the hotel you were reserved into in your final destination.”
“And after they kill me you give me a refund.”
“You must be quicker than that, or you wouldn’t be alive. What they don’t know is that after three days in that hotel you sat down with another person like me, who routed you onward with new passports. And I have no idea where he or she sent you. So they trace you to the hotel, and then, as far as they’re concerned, you disappear again. If you have enough money, you can go through three travel agents. Then even the second one doesn’t know where you are.”
“Do I get to pick my destination?”
“That’s the problem. You’re going to wind up in someplace like Bulgaria or Greenland.”
“Nothing is flawless,” I said, studying her face.
“What?”
“I just realized that Louie mentioned you to me this morning. The woman who arranges escapes. But what I was looking at was the color of your eyes.” I had a not entirely unpleasant tightness in my chest. “My daughter’s boyfriend, a great kid named Tyrone, is African American, extremely dark, and he’s got eyes the color of a very light autumn leaf, sort of halfway between brown and gold. I’d never seen eyes that color before, but yours are very close.”
“You have a daughter,” she said. “How old?”
“Fourteen.”
She raised one eyebrow, and it didn’t look like she knew she was doing it. “Look like her mother?”
“Like both of us, I think. That’s what people say anyway. I don’t actually see much of me in her.”
“Just your wife?”
I changed my mind three times in the tenth of a second before I said, “Ex.” And I didn’t add anything. I didn’t answer the question she hadn’t quite asked.
When we came out, it was raining. I was wearing an untucked long-sleeved shirt, and she threw one side of her ankle-length leather coat over my shoulders, keeping me dry, and we walked, hip touching hip and her arm around me holding the coat in place, to my car. She smelled like some kind of light floral powder. When we got there, we shared an awkward but warm hip-to-hip silence as the rain drizzled down around us, surrounding the street lights with pale, luminous spheres, until I leaned forward and then back again, resisting the impulse to kiss the tip of her nose and said, “Thanks.”
She took a step back. Her expression was both amused and inquiring. She said, “No problem,” and turned toward her car.
I said, probably a little too loudly, “I had a good time.”
“I know,” she said, popping the lock. “See you.”
Then she was inside and the door was closed and I was looking at the dazzle of rain on her windshield. The door opened again, and she said, “If you want a rematch, call Louie. He usually knows where I am. I’m not going to embarrass myself by asking if you want my number.” The door closed, the lights went on, and she gave me a tiny blurt of her horn and pulled away. I watched her go, kicking myself for everything I’d done and hadn’t done.
After Kathy and I split up, I lived like a monk—well, a burglar monk—for several years. I was still in love with Kathy, for one thing, and for another, I didn’t want to be the absent father who shows up from time to time to introduce his daughter to the latest in a stream of women. I had a friend who did exactly that, and his kids made a point of addressing Thursday’s girlfriend, so to speak, using the name of Wednesday’s. Not easy to explain away if you’re the embarrassed philanderer.
And anyway, I was never a philanderer, which is a word that’s gone out of style for a good reason; it sounds kind of quaint and harmless, but there’s nothing harmless about what it describes. Kathy had been my girlfriend in both junior high and high school, with a couple of brief breakups to maintain the drama level kids need, and it was always clear to me that eventually we’d be married. What hadn’t been clear was that we’d fall apart, and that it would be my fault.
