Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  I didn’t hear the tap on the front door until it reached a certain volume. I was nursing a headache, the result of too little sleep. Around two I’d awakened with a scream dying in my throat and the last vestiges of a nightmare clinging to my back like some hellish succubus. I’d come downstairs to the Cafe and sat for a while in the dark, sipping a cup of coffee and shivering. The row of bottles behind the bar winked at me in the moonlight, and maybe I considered it—hell yeah, I considered it. I’d even gone behind there and touched them all, read their names out loud. I selected a glass and held it underneath the spigot before I came to my senses.

  “Hey! Anybody home?”

  I got the door unlocked and let him in. He was about my height, maybe thirty years old, with a lean, pale face and the kind of big, dark eyes that hinted at all kinds of secrets. He was ridiculously good-looking, the kind of guy that’d set the hearts of office girls aflutter for miles around, and there were dimples in his cheeks.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Stoyles. I’m Chris—Chris DuBois. From New Orleans, although you probably can’t tell. I been gone awhile.” His hands were big, warm, and very clean, and when he shook my hand, his grip was just right—not so weak as to be effeminate, but he didn’t try to strong-arm me either. I can’t stand a guy who shakes hands like he’s trying to break my wrist. Mr. DuBois tossed his jacket over a chair and looked around the place, and already it seemed like he belonged. He wore his clothes like he’d been born in them, but it wasn’t cocky self-assurance. He was simply… comfortable. “How many taps you got?”

  “Uh, four for right now. I’m planning on expanding later on.”

  “Good.” He went behind the bar and examined the rows of liquor bottles, counted the glasses. “You need more highball glasses, especially if you got girls coming in here. Women like them kinds of drinks with cherries and stuff.” He opened the refrigerator and looked over the contents, murmuring to himself. “Not bad, not bad. You serve food?”

  “Uh, sandwiches, french fries, that sort of thing. The kitchen’s in back.”

  “Uh-huh.” He opened and closed cupboard doors, rang open the till drawer, and tried the hot and cold running water. “Ice?”

  “Every day. There’s a truck. Let me show you the delivery entrance.” I took him through the back and showed him the door that let onto a narrow alley the locals called a lane way. Built on the slope of the hill, it descended through several steps and platforms, but the whole city was like that, a series of terraces and inclines rising up in a northwesterly direction from the waterfront.

  “Kinda like Frisco, huh?” He smiled at me; his teeth were very white, his bottom lip soft and sensuous and full. I wondered what kind of a kisser he was, and just as quickly accepted I’d maybe never find out. “You ever been to Frisco?”

  “Yeah, I been to Frisco.” I hoped he’d leave it at that. I wasn’t interested in some guy who’d make my personal business his own. “A while back.” I couldn’t get a read on him. On the one hand, he seemed interested in working at the Cafe, but on the other, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other if he got the job or not. “I can’t afford to pay you very much, Mr. DuBois.”

  “Chris.” He grinned. “I ain’t standing on no ceremony, and whatever you’re offering is fine by me.” He glanced around once more and reached for my hand. “Sold, Mr. Stoyles.”

  “Jack.” I maybe held on to his hand a moment longer than was strictly necessary. “Just Jack.”

  CHRIS AND I worked together like the proverbial well-oiled machine, and as much as I hate clichés, it was true. He made it clear I could depend on him, and I returned the favor by letting him have the run of the kitchen and the bar. He talked me into hiring a part-time cook to handle the lunch crowd, and found me Dave Chan, a quiet Chinese kid from around the corner, whose family had been here for at least a hundred years and who could cook like nobody’s business. I let Chris supervise Dave, not that Dave needed much in the way of supervision; he was a good kid, quiet and polite and very clean, and he always left the kitchen spotless at the end of the day, which impressed me. I tried to stay out of Chris’s way and let him do his thing, so when I wasn’t in my office at the back, I confined myself to waiting tables and filling up the coffee cups. Things might have gone along all right until the first Tuesday after Easter, the day the redhead came in.

  “Hey, Jack!” Chris called to me from behind the bar. “There’s a phone call for you. I think it’s Frankie.” Too bad Frankie wasn’t the redhead in question; it might have saved Chris a world of grief if he had been, but neither my luck nor his ever tended to go that way.

  She came in through the front door like she owned the place, towing an expensive-looking suitcase behind her and wearing a fur stole. She was maybe twenty-nine or thirty, with the kind of creamy-pale complexion some women are just born with, and intelligent green eyes. Her lips were full and painted bright red to match her hair. The suit she wore was wool, and I could tell by looking that her stockings weren’t exactly wartime surplus. It had been ages since I’d seen a dame with real silk on her legs, but she wore it like she deserved it, and maybe she did. She stopped at a table near the window and looked around, then sat carefully, smoothing her skirt under her behind. It was a real nice behind—yeah, I noticed—and the rest of her went with it. She was classy all the way through, the kind of dame that makes you work for it.

  But don’t you understand? There’s no way! I couldn’t possibly. I’ll tell them that you forced me. I will. I promise.

  I shook off the bad memory and turned back to the phone. Frankie was giving me directions to a poker game that night in the city’s East End and telling me to bring enough to cover all my bets. We joked a bit about his awful luck and how I always beat him in the end, and by the time he rang off, Chris was at the redhead’s table, taking down her order. As I watched, she reached out and ran one long red fingernail down his arm, right where his rolled-up shirtsleeve left it bare, and I felt something then that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  I got over there double-quick. “Anything I can get for you, Chris?”

  “Aw, no thanks, Jack. It’s okay. I got it covered.”

  The redhead sized me up and stuck out her hand. “Chris tells me you own this place. I’m Julie—Julie Fayre. Isn’t it funny? Everybody thinks I made it up, but it’s my real name. I just got in from Montreal. It’s so good to be home.” Her voice was low and throaty, the accent more Canadian than local, that kind of neutral, midcontinent sound that might be Upper Manhattan or Toronto, you’re never really sure.

  “Jack Stoyles.” I dropped her hand like it had burned me. “Chris, can I have a word with you?”

  The redhead caught Chris’s eye and winked. “He’s afraid I’m going to corrupt you.” She turned her gaze on me and let it play over me, taking her time. Obviously she liked what she saw. “I think I’m going to like this place. Such big, strong, handsome men to look out for me.” She took out a compact and a lipstick, and suddenly all I could think about was Miss Julie Fayre with Chris—touching him, kissing him, running her long red fingernails up the inside of his thigh, pausing to cup the bulge at his crotch, rubbing him through his clothes… making love with him in some cheap hotel room, taking off her clothes and opening her legs to him, running her hands over his body, touching his mouth, his closed eyelids, his cock.

  I broke away and went to the bar and made like I was busy with a phone call. I knew a guy, a reporter at the local newspaper, the St. John’s Telegram, by the name of Dan O’Hagan. He and I sometimes got together to drink coffee and play dominoes—he claimed to be addicted to the game and kept a set of tiles in his desk at work. If things were quiet at the Cafe, I’d sometimes go over to his office on Duckworth Street and play a game or two. Dan knew everything about everybody in town, from the oldest founder families to the lowliest “corner boy” busking for pennies in front of the train station. He could recite the lineages of the great merchant families, like the Bowrings and the Ayres, and whistle e
very single one of Johnny Burke’s tunes from start to finish. He knew what ships came in and when, and what they might be carrying. He kept track of troop movements into and out of the city, and how many Americans, Canadians, British, and others were in temporary residence at any given time. I suspected Dan’s day job was just a front. Where I came from, any guy who knows that much about everything has some other racket on the side.

  I wasn’t really interested in Dan’s covert connections, though. Right now I wanted to find out what he knew about Miss Julie Fayre, who she was and where she came from.

  “Julie Fayre?” It was hard to mistake the astonishment in his voice. “Julie Fayre, she of the silken, russet hair? Jack, Jack, my son, you’re killing me here.” She was the daughter of one of the oldest construction families in the country, and her family was responsible for the bulk of the work being done on the new Army base at Fort Pepperrell. Julie had gone to college in Boston, where she had excelled. She was beautiful, she was rich, she was educated and intelligent. She was everything a guy like Chris could want, dammit. “What’s Julie Fayre doing in your place? She slumming, or what?”

  “Thanks a lot, Dan.”

  “Jesus, boy, that’s the quality, sure. Tell her to stay there. I’ll be wanting a whack at that myself.”

  “That’s okay, Dan. I think Chris and I can handle it from here.” I rang off.

  Chris was waiting for me. “Did you want me for something, Jack?”

  “Naw, it can wait. Get Miss Fayre’s order, will you?”

  He stayed where he was, the tray clasped in his arms, his beautiful face wearing a puzzled, slightly hurt expression. “Did I do something wrong, Jack?”

  “No.” I’ll tell everyone you forced me. I will. I’ll tell them. “No, it’s fine.” I pressed my hand against my forehead, willing it away, but the damned memory stuck, embedded in my brain like some weird music you hear once and can never get rid of.

  “We’ll talk later, huh?” His palm was warm on my shoulder, burning heat through my shirt.

  I gazed into his dark eyes, pulled as ever toward him. It would be so easy some night, when both of us were alone in the Cafe, to lean over and kiss him, to feel the slow, sweet burn of his tongue in my mouth and his hands on my body, but some part of me knew it was no good. None of this was any good. I didn’t even know if Chris went that way, and as for me, I’d be damned if I’d start anything. Oh no, that wasn’t for me. Jack Stoyles was good and finished with that whole love routine.

  “Yeah, Chris. We’ll talk later.” I pretended an itch on my shoulder, an excuse to shrug him off, and went back to my office.

  Around midafternoon, the cafe’s traffic slacked off, but Julie Fayre stayed on, drinking endless cups of coffee and flirting with Chris. Once I looked out and he was sitting next to her, and her hand was lying casually on his lap. It wasn’t hard to imagine where things were going between them, and I’d be willing to lay bets that Miss Julie Fayre intended to get her hooks in him. I wondered how that would go over with her family—according to Dan, her old man was plenty rich and plenty starchy, and maybe he wouldn’t want some daughter of his getting cozy with a mere bartender. Nuts to both of them. If she wanted Chris so bad, she could have him, and good luck to her.

  Did you ever notice how, when you’re preoccupied with something you think is really big, something even bigger walks in the door?

  I didn’t even see him until he was standing in front of me, waiting patiently, his hands folded, an expensive raincoat draped over his arm. I had bent down to fiddle with a tap, and as I straightened, I caught a whiff of his cologne: warm and spicy, with something kind of citrusy low, underneath. And then I was looking into dark eyes with long, thick eyelashes and asking him if I could help him, while my heart pounded in my chest and my stomach spawned its own little butterfly air force.

  Maybe he said something; I don’t know. It seemed like the world around me, the Cafe and the street outside, all vanished into meaningless noise, and there was only him: his eyes, the curve of his mouth, his beautiful hands. His expression was one of gentle curiosity, tempered with a subtle sadness, and he seemed like somebody whose patience was very probably infinite.

  “I wonder if you might help me.” At first I couldn’t place the accent. He was definitely not local, but he didn’t sound like anybody I had ever heard either. There was something English in his voice, but that influence had been laid down long ago and had since been superseded by other tones, mellifluous and almost Mediterranean, with their liquid vowels and careful voicing of the consonants.

  “Sure thing, mister. I’ll do what I can.” My mouth was moving, sound was coming out, but I might have been telling him giant spiders had broken through the ceiling of the Cafe and were eating their way toward me. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I wanted to stay near him because he would understand me, and he would give me what I needed; I was certain of it.

  “I am looking for a particular building, which I believe is somewhere around here. The museum building, I believe it is. They told me it has an arch on the front. It is a red brick and sandstone building. Do you know it?” He unfolded a travelers’ map from the inside pocket of his jacket and spread it open on the bar. “Now, here is a bus stop, and here is another road, leading down towards the water. Don’t you think it smells absolutely awful down here? It’s like the Nile.”

  Yes. That was it. Now I knew, and the minute I realized it, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight. I was back on the Delaware River Bridge, the wind whistling in my ears and my knuckles white, trying to work up the nerve to jump. “Egypt?” I could hardly speak. “You’re Egyptian.”

  “Oh, yes—forgive my bad manners.” He extended a hand across the bar. “I am Samuel Halim, assistant to the British consul, and you?”

  I managed to croak out my name and give him the directions he needed. He thanked me and left, and that was it. As stupid and crazy as it sounds, it took everything I had not to run out the door after him. I didn’t even notice Julie Fayre had gone, or Chris was standing by the bar, looking at me like I’d just gone nuts.

  “Jack?” He leaned in and touched my arm. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I forced myself to breathe. “Yeah, Chris, I’m okay.”

  “You don’t look okay.” He squinted at me. “You look kinda sick.”

  “Did you see that man?”

  He glanced over the cafe. “What man?”

  “Guy that was just in here, Egyptian guy. He had a map, he asked me….” Like a dream that can’t survive the light of day, the memory of him was leaving me. Maybe no one had come in. Maybe I had merely imagined him—his big, soft eyes and his gentle hands, and that sculpted mouth. Maybe he wasn’t real at all. I reached behind the bar for my jacket and slipped into it. “I’m going for a walk. Can you keep an eye on the place?”

  “Sure, Jack. Anything at all.” He reached out and caught hold of my elbow. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, just fine,” I lied. I wasn’t sure of anything. I wasn’t sure at all.

  “By the way, the afternoon paper’s here.” He tossed it on the bar. “Jeez, I thought this place was supposed to be safe.” The headline screamed it loud and clear: ENGINEER DEAD OF GUNSHOT WOUNDS. “Somebody killed the poor bastard first thing this morning. Can you believe that?”

  Chapter 3

  THERE’S A river that runs through the city, arising somewhere to the west and emptying eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. At the extreme east end of the river are the shipyards, busy now in wartime, working nearly nonstop. Like most displaced Americans, I liked to spend my free time at the railway station, watching the trains, or on the waterfront, trying to ignore the harbor’s stench while the great warships came and went. If I was really preoccupied with something big and dangerous, I’d walk for a while, usually down by the river, but sometimes I’d go uptown, heading north toward the city’s widening sprawl. It got so that I knew the city better than I’d known my old home town of Philadelphia.
People here were friendly, and they’d often call a greeting to me or sound their car horns if they saw me walking by. More than once some customer of my cafe would stop and offer me a lift; even the streetcar drivers knew me by sight.

  I was walking by myself one day, maybe six weeks after Julie Fayre had first come into the Heartache, and when a dark blue late-model car pulled level with me on Duckworth Street, I didn’t think anything of it.

  “Mr. Stoyles. I wonder if we might have a word?” It was the accent—not to mention the precise diction—that made me look up. I didn’t recognize the man behind the wheel, but he apparently knew me. The car slid to a stop just in front of me, and he reached across to open the passenger side door. “Would you get in?”

  Growing up in Philly, you learn a thing or two—and my mother told me never to accept car rides from strangers. “Don’t think so, pal, but thanks all the same.”

  “Why ever not? I am headed your way.” The smile was silkily accommodating. He gestured at the seat with one gloved hand. “Please. I will take only a few moments of your time, and it is very important that I talk to you.”

  “What for?”

  “You have heard about the murdered engineer?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I have reason to believe that the man who was murdered might somehow be connected to you, Mr. Stoyles.” He sat back. “Please. I have information. You will find it to your benefit to hear me out.”