Cat?
Hi.
Whats going on? What do you know about this thing?
I think I talked to him. The bomber.
Youre kidding.
Three days ago. Were not sure yet, but I think I talked to him.
You talked to him. He called you.
Its my job, baby. Im the one they call.
Where are you?
Home.
Do you want some dinner?
I guess. Im honestly not sure.
Im going to buy you a drink and some dinner.
Thatd be so nice.
Where do you want to go?
Someplace unchallenging. You pick.
Right. How about Le Blanc?
Great. Perfect.
Half an hour?
Half an hour.
He hung up. While they were talking, Cat had done it again. Picked up a pen and written in her spiral notebook:
Fortress of solitude? Does dirt = filth? Whereas the little house?
She tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. When had regular note-taking turned into whatever this was? Free association. Had it started after 9/11? She hoped so. Cause and effect were always comforting.
She got to Le Blanc in exactly half an hour. She was the first to arrive, as shed expected. Simon could never just put down the phone and walk away, not even in an emergency. He lived in an ongoing state of emergency. He traded futures. (Yes, he had explained it all to her, and, no, she still didnt understand what exactly it was that he did.) Fortunes flicked across his computer screen, falling and rising and falling again.
He was the man behind the curtain. If he failed to take care of business, Oz might dissolve in an emerald mist. Hed be there as soon as he could.
Cat herself could not overcome her habit of punctuality. Shed tried. It wasnt in her to be late for anything, ever.
A place like Le Blanc was Simons idea of unchallenging because it wasnt cool anymore. Three years ago it had been a Laundromat, just a dingy hole on Mott Street, and then somebody cleaned the hundred-year-old tile walls, put up yellowed mirrors, installed a zinc-topped bar, and poof, it was a perfect Parisian bistro. For a while it was an epicenter, then it faded. Regular people could get in now. At a front table sat a couple who were clearly not from the neighborhood. He was all gold jewelry; shed draped her faux Versace over the back of her chair. Moscow-riche. A year ago, theyd have been stopped at the threshold. Cats idea of unchallenging was more like well, okay, an entirely unchallenging restaurant was not coming immediately to mind.
She passed through a moment with the hostess, a new girl, megasmiley in her confusion over what exactly to do with a black woman whod arrived alone. Before the girl could speak, Cat said, Im meeting Simon Dry den. I believe we have a reservation.
The girl consulted her list. Why, yes, she said. Mr. Dry den isnt here yet.
Lets get me seated then, shall we?
The queenly bearing and the schoolmarm diction, the smiling ultraformality. You did what you had to do.
Absolutely, the hostess chimed, and led Cat to the second booth.
As Cat settled in, she locked eyes with Fred. Fred was one of the legion of New York actors who impersonated waiters while they hoped things would break for them. He wasnt young anymore, though. He was becoming what hed once pretended to be: a wisecracking waiter, brusque and charmingly irreverent, knowledgeable about wines.
Hello, Fred, Cat said.
Hey, said Fred. Perfectly cordial, but glassy somehow. Caught up short. For Cat, sans Simon, he had no banter strategy.
How are you?
Good. Im good. Can I get you a drink?
Funny how hard it could be, sitting alone in a restaurant. Funny to be someone who could calmly talk to psychopaths but had trouble being an unescorted woman who made a waiter uncomfortable.
She had Fred bring her a Ketel One on the rocks. She looked at the menu.
Cattle fed on bonemeal? Slaughter of the innocents? Poison in the walls?
Well, now. Apparently, at moments of stress, she didnt need to write them down anymore.
She was on her second vodka when Simon arrived. It still shocked her sometimes, seeing him in public. He was so unassailably young and fit. He was a Jaguar, he was a goddamned parade float rolling along, demonstrating to ordinary citizens that a gaudier, grander world a world of potently serene, self-contained beauty appeared occasionally amid the squalor of ongoing business; that behind the blank, gray face of things there existed an inner realm of wealth and ease, of urbane celebration. She watched the hostess check him out. She watched him stride with the confidence of a brigadier general to her table, stunning in his midnight-blue suit. It might as well have been spangled with tiny stars and planets.
Cattle fed on bonemeal? Slaughter of the innocents? Poison in the walls?
Well, now. Apparently, at moments of stress, she didnt need to write them down anymore.
She was on her second vodka when Simon arrived. It still shocked her sometimes, seeing him in public. He was so unassailably young and fit. He was a Jaguar, he was a goddamned parade float rolling along, demonstrating to ordinary citizens that a gaudier, grander world a world of potently serene, self-contained beauty appeared occasionally amid the squalor of ongoing business; that behind the blank, gray face of things there existed an inner realm of wealth and ease, of urbane celebration. She watched the hostess check him out. She watched him stride with the confidence of a brigadier general to her table, stunning in his midnight-blue suit. It might as well have been spangled with tiny stars and planets.
He kissed her on the lips. Yes, people, Im his date. Im his girlfriend, okay?
Sorry Im late, he said. Youre fine. Is it crazy at work?
"Youre asking meT Simon frowned compassionately. His brows bristled like a pair of chocolate-colored caterpillars. Cat had an urge to stroke them.
Crazy is a relative concept, she said.
Mm, he said. So, you think you talked to this guy.
Simon was going to be stern and unhysterical, even a little casual in this, his first secondhand crisis. He was going to be someone who could manage the news of a random bomber with the same grave suavity she knew he must bring to his business deals.
Lets get you a drink, and Ill tell you about it, Cat said.
He sat down across from her. Fred came right away.
Hey, Fred, Simon said. Hed been a regular since the restaurants glory days, was adored for continuing to come.
Hey, homeboy, Fred answered, fluent in manspeak.
Heard the news? Simon asked.
Scary.
You know Cat, right?
Absolutely. Hey, Cat.
Cats with the police department. Shes working on this one.
/ live in a world of danger, Fred. Tm deeper inside of things than you can possibly know.
Youre kidding, Fred said. Cat watched him go through an intricate reassessment. All right, she had a real job and quite possibly an interesting one. But bottom line, didnt this make her one of those grim black women, the sticklers for protocol who torture the populace from behind civic counters and post-office windows?
Not at liberty to discuss it, Cat said.
Right, right. Fred nodded sagely. He was up to the challenge of playing a waiter who could be trusted with a little inside information. He was more than up to it.
Cat said, Simon, why dont you order yourself a drink?
Simon paused, then said, Right. Just a glass of wine, I think. Like maybe a Shiraz?
The Chilean or the Sonoma? Fred asked.
You pick.
Chilean.
Good.
Fred nodded again, in Cats direction. Undercover waiter. Good in a crisis. He went off to get the wine.
What was it with men? Why were they so eager to impersonate someone brave and competent and in the know?
Simon, baby, Cat said, you cant say things like that. Not to waiters.
Got you. Sorry.
You cant be showing me off to people. Besides, Im not Foxy Brown. Im just a grunt, really.
Its because Im proud of you.
I know.
So. What happened?
A kid called in with a bomb threat. Thats all.
And you think its this kid who blew the guy up?
Possibly.
The kid must have known the guy, right?
She hesitated. She had to give him something, didnt she? He was her boyfriend. And admit it this was part of what she had to offer him.
It would seem that way. My guess is, its a sex thing. Odds are well get a missing report from somewhere in the vicinity of Dick Hartes neighborhood, and well find that hed been blowing the perpetrator in the backseat of his BMW.
Cat knew the word perpetrator would be exciting to Simon. Shed promised herself to stop acting extra coplike to turn him on. Screwed that one up.
Right, Simon said. His brows bristled. It would have been nice to peel them gently off his face, hold them in her palm, then put them carefully back again.
What do you want to eat? she asked. I dont know. The tuna, I guess.
Simon was Atkins. High protein, no carbs. And really, consider the results.
Im going to have the steak au poivre, she said. And mashed potatoes.
Mommas had a very hard day. All right?
They went back to her place that night, and never mind about the mess. She was rattled she realized how much she wanted her own bed. Simon didnt mind her crappy apartment every now and then. He claimed to like it, actually. Although shed never come out and asked him, it was likely that until he met her hed never been to East Fifth Street.
She woke up at 3:30. She didnt have to look at the clock. She knew this abrupt and arid consciousness, this jump from deep dreams to a wakefulness that was not so much having slept enough as having suddenly lost the knack for sleep. On the nights it happened, it always happened between 3:30 and 4:00. She had a little something for it in the medicine cabinet, but shed never even opened the bottle. She seemed to prefer insomnia to simulated sleep. Control thing. Fucked up, really, but what could she do?
Simon breathed steadily beside her. She let herself stare at him as he grimaced over a dream. He was a true classic. Big, broad anchor-man face, vigorous thatch of sable-colored hair beginning to be threaded, here and there, with strands of sterling silver. He could have been fresh off the assembly line of whatever corporation produced the Great American Beauties. The corporation would be somewhere in the Midwest, wouldnt it? And yes, he came from Iowa, didnt he? Great-great-grandson of immigrants whod escaped New York for the prairie, hed returned in triumph a hundred or so years later, the exiled prince restored to his true home by way of the Ivy League. Rich and healthy, thirty-three years old. Practically adolescent, in man-years.
Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, shed been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a sub world, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their television sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.