Every Brilliant Eye (16 page)

“Sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

“Five minutes,” she said, smiling. “But half the lead time in the publishing business is spent waiting. I’m used to it.”

“Me too. Are we going to start right in with what’s wrong with the book industry?”

“No.” She took my arm. “It’s my morning off too.”

We went out past the other men in the lobby. Their eyes followed us out like wind-drawn leaves.

The morning was a degree or two cooler than the one before, but still shirtsleeve weather if you kept to the sun. I closed the car door on her and went around to the driver’s side and got in and we introduced ourselves to the morning traffic on Michigan Avenue.

Downtown was lively. The sidewalks were anthills and if you drove defensively the way the signs say you got to sit behind a string of buses all day and watch the lights change. I closed up behind an empty haulaway and squirted across Randolph to catch Monroe on the pink. A Caddy convertible with sixteen black Errol Flynn gang members in the back seat laid down horn as I skinned past its custom chrome. Its driver waved at me with a single digit.

“Is it always like this?” asked Mrs. Starr.

“Not always. It gets crowded around noon.”

She looked at me. “You don’t ever turn it off, do you?”

“It’s been called a fault.”

“By people who don’t have it, I bet.”

“I like you, Mrs. Starr.”

“Louise. Where are we going?”

“We’re there.”

She turned in her seat to look around. We were entering the block between Brush and Beaubien, with produce markets and restaurants and coffee houses on both sides displaying bright red and yellow hand-painted signs. Pigeon-splattered awnings overhung racks of tomatoes and radishes and heads of lettuce, where squat women carrying bushel baskets chattered at aproned proprietors whose heads rotated from side to side negatively as if mounted on swivels. An old man wearing a cloth cap and tobacco streaks in his white moustache leaned in the doorway of the steamship office, glaring around between pulls on a brown paper-wrapped bottle that probably contained retsina.

“It looks significant,” said Louise.

“Greektown,” I said. “What’s left of it, anyway. When you’re hungry in Detroit, here is where you come.”

I hung a right onto Beaubien and bumped over the broken paving in a lot behind one of the markets, parking near a stake truck where two young men in workclothes were unloading crates of rutabagas onto a dock. We walked back to Monroe, cutting between buildings with the smells of stuffed cabbage and fresh baklava mingling outside the kitchen vents.

“It reminds me a little of the Village. Only not as big.”

“It was bigger once,” I said. “It started here and held the line for fifty years against the blacks and Germans and Arabs along Macomb and Randolph. Now it’s just this one block. The city hasn’t gotten around to tearing it down yet to make room for a steering gear plant or something equally colorful.”

“There’s some construction going on there.” She pointed at a brick warehouse on the corner, where scaffolding had been erected and a man in coveralls was sandblasting soot off the front.

I said, “They’re going to make it into an indoor mall. To revitalize Greektown. Sell pine cigarette boxes made in Taiwan with pictures of Achilles inside the lid and T-shirts with the Athens skyline silk-screened across the front. We’ll meet here two years from today and order a roast lamb’s head through a microphone at the curb.” I touched her arm, steering her through the open door of a storefront with waisted curtains in the windows.

It was a restaurant inside, with a bare plank floor and a narrow aisle running between a row of turning stools at the counter and some wobbly-looking tables and chairs flung about the room. The floor canted upward slightly toward the rear, giving the impression of space. The entire establishment seated thirty if no one objected to intimacy with his neighbor’s elbow. At this hour there were two diners at opposite ends of the counter and three more at the tables, two of them together. A speaker at the far end was tumbling frantic violin music out into the room.

“You said this is better than the hotel?” Louise inspected the rump-polished vinyl seat of the chair I had drawn out for her before sitting down.

I took the chair facing hers. “I hear in New York they charter buses to a roach hatchery in the South Bronx because the Vagabond Gourmet gave it some stars.”

“No one goes to the Bronx just for—oh, I see.” She played with a corner of the tri-folded napkin in front of her. “Has anyone ever told you you’re something of a snob?”

“Once. If she looked like you I’d have taken it.”

We were looking at each other when the waitress came and set two glasses of water on the table. She had fenders like a GMC truck under a knobbly white uniform, and a watch smaller than Louise’s rode her bare wrist like a rubber band around a leg of lamb. Her eyes were dark and angelic, trapped in balloons of flesh. She wore her hair in a net. I asked her how the moussaka was today.

“You’ll think you died and went to Mount Olympus.”

“I thought that was just for gods.”

“What do I know, I’m from Warren.”

“What’s moussaka?” Louise asked.

“Stuffed eggplant, ground beef, green peppers in tomato sauce,” said the waitress.

“For breakfast?”

“Greeks don’t eat lunch.” I handed up the menus. “Moussaka twice, and two bowls of egg lemon soup.”

“Ouzo?”

“No. Too early in the day to risk losing the rest of it.”

“Iced tea, please.”

The waitress rolled off. We sipped our water and listened to the music. Louise glanced around, at the scoured interior and fishing scenes on the walls. “They won’t go broke on atmosphere.”

“Atmosphere’s to keep your mind off what’s going on in the kitchen. The food’s good here. It always is when a Greek’s in charge, for some reason.”

“Do you know the owner?”

“I did a job for him once.”

She didn’t go after it. “Have you lived in Detroit all your life?”

“I was born here. My father had part ownership of a garage on West McNichols, but most of his money came from the pumps out front. Then two companies that were listed on the exchange got into a war and inside of six months he and fifty other independents were looking for work as curbside attendants, read that gas jockeys. He finally shipped me out to a burg an hour’s drive west of here and I grew up there.”

“What happened to him?”

“Twenty years later he died.”

Her lips parted, showing an even line of fine white teeth. Her tea came. She made a thing of removing the wedge of lemon from the lip of her glass and laying it down just so while the waitress withdrew beyond earshot. Then: “I take back what I said before. It can be a fault. What are you protecting yourself from?”

“I’m a detective, Mrs. Starr. Louise. People pay me two-fifty a day and expenses to find things out. After you’ve been doing it a while you get to thinking of information as a commodity. Ours is not a giveaway society.”

“I don’t think that’s it. I think you like to keep people at arm’s length from what you are. You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

“And you’re married. Between the two of us we reflect the entire adult population in microcosm.”

She laced her fingers together under her chin. “You know, you’ve never asked me about my husband.”

“What about him?”

“We’re very close. We’ve been married for five years and when I’m away from him I miss him. He’s a vice president in a firm that manufactures and sells office copiers, very successful. All his friends are successful vice presidents. Their wives own antique shops in Connecticut and go to aerobics classes out on Long Island.”

“You don’t.”

“Who has time? When I’m not away at a sales conference or helping some tortured young Marxist with a literary bent kill martinis at a club with a fifty-dollar cover, I play a little tennis. Stooping and stretching to Rod Stewart is not my idea of a sound time investment.”

“Your body isn’t your temple?”

“If it were, it would seem sacrilegious to cover it with sweat, don’t you think?”

Our moussaka came. The green peppers and tomato sauce seduced our nostrils. She took a forkful and made sounds of ecstasy. I said, “How come you don’t wear a wedding ring?”

“I’m allergic to gold.”

I grinned.

“No, really. I break out.”

“You’re the perfect woman, Louise.”

“That’s disrespectful of women.”

“The hell with that. It’s getting so you can’t pass along a compliment without looking it over first to see if something’s sticking to it.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were making a joke.”

“It started out as one.”

We ate. She laid her knife and fork in her empty plate. “You haven’t told me about this threat you received.”

“I get them from time to time, probably not as often as you think. I don’t even know that this one has anything to do with what I’m working on. If I started listening to them I’d never get anything done.”

“You’re not getting much done this morning. On the case.”

I left a third of my moussaka untasted and rinsed my mouth out with water. It was a little early for so much spice after all. “Telephone threats, the ones that mean anything anyway, are usually followed by tails. Just to see if it took. Sometimes they’re made just to get someone mad enough to do the exact opposite. If I do nothing for a while maybe I’ll see which way they want it.”

“In other words, if they are watching you and you both do nothing, the threat is genuine.”

“Put that way it sounds pretty stupid. But yeah.”

“And if it’s something else they want, they’ll do—what?”

“They’ll call me again, or maybe send someone to pay me a visit, and spell it out.”

“With brass knuckles?”

“You’ve been editing too many detective novels. They don’t use knucks much anymore, except for parades. You can buy three months in the school of locks just for having them in your possession. Nowadays they run to jack handles and rolls of quarters, things no cop that stopped you for forgetting to signal a turn would look twice at. But to answer your question, no. The hard lessons come later.”

She watched me for a moment. Then she shook her head. Her hair threw off soft sparks in the light. “You move in a whole different world.”

I said nothing, and she returned to her iced tea. I touched the lip of my water glass. “He went to work in a steel foundry,” I said.

“Who did?”

“My father. After he sent me away to live. He died of a coronary in the heat treatment plant the year he would have retired.”

The hectic violins played. After a stretch she smiled and laid her fingers on my hand resting on the table. They were cool from the glass of tea.

T
HE OLD CLOCK
in the living room chimed eleven, grinding and wheezing between the strokes like a fat old man climbing stairs. It made me want to go out and help it. Almost.

Louise undressed with the bedroom window at her back. I had drawn the shade and curtains, softening the light in the room to a medium gray. Pale double shadows fluttered on the wall as she drew off the silk blouse and then stepped out of the long skirt. The teddy she had on underneath was a very light blue, almost eggshell-colored, and shone softly. I went over and helped her out of that. She was golden all over.

“I didn’t know busy editors had time to scout out nude beaches.” My voice sounded scarcely louder than the quiet in the room.

“Far Rockaway,” she said, and hers was even quieter. “I bought one of those suits that don’t block the ultraviolet rays. But I think I’ll go back to a regular bikini. I like to see how my tan is doing.”

“I like it this way.”

We kissed. Our tongues touched and I felt the warmth of her through my clothes. Her naked back was smooth under my palms. The air was sheathed in jasmine. When we finished kissing she undid two buttons on my shirt and traced my collarbone lightly with her fingers. “Do you have music?”

“What do you like?”

“Something appropriate. And not under twenty years old.”

“Lady, you came to the right place.”

In the living room I took Bunny Berigan down from the shelf and started him turning on the cheap stereo. The first notes of “I Can’t Get Started” crept out of the speakers—the good version, no singing, just his trumpet playing like raw silk sliding over polished stone. I turned the volume down to heartbeat level and walked away from it.

She was under the covers now, the sheet outlining her in a way even the soft light couldn’t match, falling away in a gentle pyramid from one raised knee. Her hair spilled over the pillow in a fall of muted sunlight. I stood in the doorway and stared. After a long time she smiled. “I don’t bite.”

“Like hell you don’t,” I said.

She laughed. In the next room the clock with the tired chimes listened for pointers. I went to her. She cried out softly in the half-light.

I slid out of bed, put on my robe and slippers, and sat on the edge of the mattress to get a package of cigarettes and a book of matches out of the drawer in the nightstand. Louise sighed and stirred as if she’d been asleep. A hard-nailed finger went up my spine, making me shudder.

“That’s a cliché,” she said,

I got rid of the charred match, blew smoke away from the bed, and resettled myself so that I was facing her. “What is?”

She nodded at the cigarette. “First the sex, then the smoke. I strike it when I see it. If the manuscript’s worth saving at all.”

“Clichés don’t get to be clichés by being wrong.”

“Books aren’t like life. They can’t repeat themselves.” She was looking at me. “It can’t mean anything, Amos.”

“I never thought it could.”

“It could if I let it. That’s why it won’t. I’ve finally got all my furniture arranged just the way I want it. I’m not going to start breaking it up and moving it around because of one nice morning in Detroit.”

I went on smoking. She was still looking. “I’ll bet you were thinking I was going to say I love my husband.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“I don’t know that I love him at all. It’s a final-sounding word, like death. You’d think it would be as definite. Have you ever been in love?”