A Drink Before the War

  He plopped himself lazily into the chair in front of my desk and said, “So, like, when you guys going to get a bigger office?”

  “The day I find the bell,” I said.

  Billy squinted. Slowly, he said, “Oh, right. Yeah.”

  Angie said, “How you doing, Billy?” and actually looked like she cared.

  Billy looked at her and blushed. “I’m doing…I’m doing all right. All right, Angie.”

  Angie said, “Good. I’m glad.” What a tease.

  Billy looked at my face. “What happened to you?”

  “Had a fight with a nun,” I said.

  Billy said, “You look like you had a fight with a truck,” and looked at Angie.

  Angie gave it a small giggle, and I didn’t know who I wanted to pitch out the window more.

  “You run that check for us, Billy?”

  “’Course, man. ’Course. You owe me big time on this one too, I’ll tell ya.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Billy, remember who you’re talking to.”

  Billy thought about it. Thought about the ten years he’d be doing in Walpole, fetching cigarettes for his boyfriend, Rolf the Animal, if we hadn’t saved him. His yellow skin whitened considerably, and he said, “Sorry, man. You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a somewhat greasy, very wrinkled piece of paper on my desk.

  “What am I looking at here, Billy?”

  “Jenna Angeline’s reference check,” he said. “Copped from our Jamaica Plain office. She cashed a check there on Tuesday.”

  It was greasy, it was wrinkled, but it was gold. Jenna had listed four references, all personal. Under the Job heading, she’d written, “Self-employed,” in a small, birdlike scrawl. In the personal references she’d listed four sisters. Three lived in Alabama, in or around Mobile. One lived in Wickham, Massachusetts. Simone Angeline of 1254 Merrimack Avenue.

  Billy handed me another piece of paper—a Xerox of the check Jenna had cashed. The check was signed by Simone Angeline. If Billy hadn’t been such a slimy-looking dude, I would have kissed him.

  After Billy left, I finally got up the nerve to take a look in the mirror. I’d avoided it all last night and this morning. My hair’s short enough to make do with a finger comb, so after my shower this morning, that’s exactly what I did. I’d skipped shaving too, and if I had a little stubble, I told myself it was hip, very GQ.

  I crossed the office and entered the tiny cubicle that someone had once referred to as “the bathroom.” It’s got a toilet all right, but even that’s in miniature, and I always feel like an adult locked in a preschool whenever I sit on it and my knees hit my chin. I shut the door behind me and raised my head from the munchkin sink and looked in the mirror.

  If I hadn’t been me, I wouldn’t have recognized my face. My lips were blown up to twice their size and looked like they’d French-kissed a weed whacker. My left eye was fringed by a thick rope of dark brown and the cornea was streaked with bright red threads of blood. The skin along my temple had split when Blue Cap hit me with the butt of the Uzi, and while I slept, the blood had clotted in some hair. The right side of my forehead where I assume I’d hit the school wall was raw and scraped. If I wasn’t the manly detective type, I might have wept.

  Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well. But I have a scar the size and texture of a jellyfish on my abdomen already, and you’d be surprised how your sense of self changes when you can’t take your shirt off at the beach. In my more private moments, I pull up my shirt and look at it, tell myself it doesn’t matter, but every time a woman has felt it under her palm late at night, propped herself up on a pillow and asked me about it, I’ve made my explanation as quick as possible, closed the doors to my past as soon as they’ve opened, and not once, even when Angie’s asked, have I told the truth. Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they’re also the first forms of protection I ever knew.

  The Hero always gave me a dope slap upside the head whenever he caught me looking in the mirror. “Men built those things so women would have something to do,” he’d say. Hero. Philosopher. My father, the Renaissance man.

  When I was sixteen, I had deep blue eyes and a nice smile, and little else to take confidence in, hanging around the Hero. And if I was still sixteen, staring into the mirror, working up some nerve, telling myself tonight I’d finally do something about the Hero, I’d definitely be at a loss.

  But now, damnit, I had a genuine case to solve, a Jenna Angeline to locate, an impatient partner on the other side of the door, a gun in my holster, detective’s license in my wallet, and…a face that looked like it belonged to a Flannery O’Connor character. Ah, vanity.

  When I opened the door, Angie was rifling through her purse, probably looking for a misplaced microwave or an old car. She looked up. “You ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  She pulled a stun gun from the purse. “What’s this guy look like again?”

  I said, “Last night he was wearing a blue cap and wraparounds. But I don’t know if it’s like his regular uniform or anything.” I opened the door. “Ange, you won’t need the stun gun. If you spot him, lay back. We just want to verify that he’s still around.”

  Angie looked at the stun gun. “It’s not for him, it’s for me. Case I need something to keep me awake in cow country.”

  Wickham is sixty miles from Boston, so Angie thinks they don’t have telephones yet.

  I said, “You can take the girl out of the city…”

  “But you’ll have to shoot her first,” she said and headed down the stairs.

  She stayed in the church, giving me a minute head start and watching the street through the lower opening of a stained-glass window.

  I crossed the street to what I call my “company car.” It’s a dark green 1979 Volaré. The Vobeast. It looks like shit, sounds like shit, drives like shit, and generally fits in well in most of the places where I have to work. I opened the door, half expecting to hear a rush of feet on the street behind me, followed by the snap of a weapon hitting the back of my skull. That’s the thing about being a victim; you start to think it’ll happen to you on a regular basis. Suddenly everything looks suspect and any brightness you may have noticed the day before has dissipated into the shadows. And the shadows are everywhere. It’s living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

  But nothing happened this time. I didn’t see Blue Cap in my rearview as I pulled a U-turn and headed for the expressway. But then, unless he’d really enjoyed last night’s encounter, I didn’t think I would see him again; I’d just have to assume he was there. I pushed the Vobeast down the avenue, then turned onto the northern on-ramp for I-93 and drove downtown.

  Twenty minutes later I was on Storrow Drive, the Charles River running by in copper flashes on my right. A couple of Mass. General nurses lunched on the lawn; a man ran over one of the footbridges with a mammoth chocolate Chow beside him. For a moment, I thought of picking one up for myself. Probably do a hell of a lot better job protecting me than Harold the Panda ever would. But then, I didn’t really need an attack dog; I had Bubba. By the boat-house, I saw a group of BU or Emerson students, stuck in the city for the summer, passing around a bottle of wine. Wild kids. Probably had some brie and crackers in their backpacks, too.

  I got off at Beacon Street, U-turned again onto the service road, and banged a quick right onto Revere Street, following its cobblestones across Charles Street and up Beacon Hill. No one behind me.

  I turned again onto Myrtle Street, the whole street no wider than a piece of dental floss, the tall colonial buildings squeezing in on me. It’s impossible to follow someone in Beacon Hill without being spotted. The streets were built before cars, and I presume, before fat or tall people.

  Back when Boston was this wonderful mythic world of midget aerobics instructors, Beacon Hill must have seemed room
y. But now, it’s cramped and narrow and shares more than a little in common with an old French provincial town—very pleasing to the eye, but functionally a disaster. A truck stopped for a delivery on the Hill can back up traffic for a mile. The streets are apt to be one-way in a northern direction for two or three blocks, then arbitrarily turn one-way to the south. This usually captures the average driver unaware and forces him to turn onto yet another narrow street with much the same problem, and before he knows it, he’s back on Cambridge or Charles or Beacon Street, looking up at the Hill, wondering how the hell he ever ended up down here again, but getting the distinct, if irrational, impression that the Hill itself threw him off.

  It’s a wonderful place to be a snob. The homes are gorgeous red brick. The parking spaces are guarded by the Boston Police. The small cafés and shops are manned by imperious owners who close their doors whenever someone they don’t recognize looks as if he may want to enter. And no one can find your address unless you, personally, draw them a map.

  I looked in my rearview as I crested the Hill, the gold dome of the State House peeking out through the wrought-iron fence of a roof garden ahead of me. Two blocks behind me, I saw a car driving slowly, the driver’s head turning left and right as if looking for an unfamiliar address.

  I took a left on Joy Street and coasted the four blocks down to Cambridge Street. As the light turned green and I crossed the intersection, I saw the same car coasting down the hill behind me. At the very top of Joy Street, another car appeared—a station wagon with a broken luggage rack on the roof. I couldn’t see the driver, but I knew it was Angie. She’d busted the luggage rack with a hammer one morning, pretending the flimsy metal was Phil.

  I turned left on Cambridge Street and drove a few blocks to the Charles Plaza. I pulled into the parking lot, took the ticket at the gate—only three dollars per half hour; what a bargain—and pulled across the lot until I was in front of the Holiday Inn. I walked inside the hotel like I had business there, turned right past the front desk and hopped the elevator to the third floor. I walked down the corridor until I found a window and stared down into the parking lot.

  Blue Cap wasn’t wearing a blue cap today. He had on a white bicycler’s cap, the brim pushed back flat against his forehead. He still wore the wraparounds, though, and a white Nike T-shirt and black sweatpants. He stood just outside of his car—a white Nissan Pulsar with black racing stripes—and leaned on the open door while he decided if he should follow me in or not. I couldn’t see his license plate numbers from this angle, and from this height, I could only guess at his age, but I put him at twenty to twenty-five. He was big—six two or so—and he looked like he knew his way around a Nautilus machine.

  Out on Cambridge Street, Angie’s car idled, double-parked.

  I looked back at Blue Cap. No point sticking around. He’d follow me into the hotel or he wouldn’t. Either way, it didn’t make any difference.

  I took the stairs down to the basement, opened a door onto a service driveway that smelled of exhaust fumes, and jumped off the loading dock. I walked past a dumpster that reeked of slowly stewing fruit and worked my way down onto Blossom Street. I took my time, but before you could say slick-as-a-wet-goose, I was back on Cambridge Street.

  All over Boston, in places you’d never notice, there are garages. It doesn’t compensate for a city as short on parking space as Moscow is on toilet paper, but at least the rental fees are exorbitant. I stepped into one between a hair salon and a florist, strolled along the garage until I came to space number eighteen, and removed the slipcover from my baby.

  Every boy needs a toy. Mine is a 1959 Porsche Roadster convertible. It’s royal blue, with a wood finish steering wheel and a twin cowl cockpit. True, “cockpit” is a term usually reserved for jets, but when I’ve taken this thing up to a hundred and forty or so, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that liftoff’s only a few more blurred road signs away. The interior is a rich white leather. The stick shift gleams like polished pewter. The horn has a keen horse emblem on it. I work on it more than I drive it, pampering it on weekends, polishing it, bringing it new parts. I’m proud to say I’ve never gone so far as to give it a name, but Angie says that’s only because I lack the imagination.

  It started with the growl of a jungle cat on the first turn of the key. I took a baseball cap from under the seat, slipped off my jacket, adjusted my sunglasses, and left the garage.

  Angie was still double-parked in front of the Plaza, which meant Blue Cap was present and accounted for. I waved and pulled out onto Cambridge, heading toward the river. She was still behind me when I reached Storrow Drive, but by the time I got to I-93, I’d left her in the dust, simply because I could. Or maybe, simply because I’m so immature. One of the two.

  8

  The drive to Wickham is not a fun one. You have to switch interchanges every third mile or so, and one wrong turn dumps you in New Hampshire, trying to talk directions with eastern rednecks who don’t speak the language. To top it off, there’s nothing to look at but the occasional industrial park, or as you get closer to the belt of towns that lie along the Merrimack River, the Merrimack River. Not a pleasant sight. Usually you have to look down a sewer grate to find water as brown and sluggish as the Merrimack’s—a casualty of the textile business that built a lot of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The next thing you see as you drive through this region are the mills themselves, and the sky turns to soot.

  I had Exile on Main St. pumping through my speakers the whole way so I didn’t mind it that much, and by the time I found Merrimack Avenue, the only thing I was worried about was leaving the car unattended.

  Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It’s dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who’ve long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It’s a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.

  Merrimack Avenue is the main strip. Simone Angeline’s address was a good ways past the center of town—the bars, gas stations, mills, and clothing factories were five miles behind me before I reached the twelve hundred block. Angie was back in my rearview mirror by then, and she passed me when I pulled onto a side street and parked the car. I set the Chapman lock and disengaged the radio, taking it with me as I got out. I took one last look back at the car and hoped that we would find Jenna soon. Real soon.

  I didn’t win my car in a card game or have it bequeathed to me by an overly generous client. I banked my money and waited, banked some more money and waited. Finally I saw it advertised and I went to the bank for a loan. I sat through an excruciating interview with a condescending loan officer who reminded me of every bitter, high-school geek who sees his adult life as a mission to avenge adolescence by being a total prick to anyone he assumes would have treated him badly in homeroom. Luckily, my practice grew and my fees rose and I soon had that monkey off my back. But I still pay the price of being constantly anxious about the only material possession I’ve ever given a damn about.

  I slid into the passenger seat of Angie’s car and she took my hand. “Don’t wowwy, baby, nothing will happen to your pride and joy. I promise.”

  She’s funny enough to shoot sometimes.

  I said, “Well, least in this neighborhood, nobody will be suspicious of this thing.”

  She said, “Oh, good one. You ever think of going into stand-up?”

  It went like that. We sat in the car and passed around a can of Pepsi and waited for our meal ticket to make a guest appearance.

  By six o’clock we were cramped and sick of each other and even sicker of looking at 1254 Merrimack Avenue. It was a faded A-frame that might have been pink once. A
Puerto Rican family had entered it an hour ago, and we’d watched a light go on in the second-floor apartment a minute or so later. Short of our second can of Pepsi exploding all over the dashboard when I opened it, that was the closest we’d come to excitement in four hours.

  I was looking through the tape collection on Angie’s floor, trying to find a group I’d heard of, when she said, “Heads up.”

  A black woman—rope thin, with a stiff, almost regal bearing—was stepping from an ’81 Honda Civic, her right arm around a bag of groceries, resting them on her hip. She looked like the picture of Jenna, but younger by a good seven or eight years. She also seemed to have too much energy for the tired woman in the photograph. She slammed the car door with her free hip, a hard, swift move that would have left Gretzky on the ice with a wet ass. She marched to the front door of the house, slid her key into the lock, and disappeared inside. A few minutes later, she appeared in silhouette by the window, a telephone receiver to her ear.

  Angie said, “How do you want to play it?”

  “Wait,” I said.

  She shifted in her seat. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She held her chin with her fingers, moved it around in a semicircle for a moment. “You don’t think Jenna’s in there?”

  “No. Since she disappeared, she’s played it relatively careful. She has to know her apartment’s been trashed. And the beating the guy in the schoolyard gave me tells me she’s probably into more than the petty theft we’re after her for. With people like that after her—maybe this Roland guy too—I don’t think she’s going to set herself up in her sister’s place.”