Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “It means do you want to leave right now, or do you want to come upstairs with me?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well?”

  “I thought …”

  “Never mind what you thought. There’s the stairway and there’s the door. What do you say?”

  There was another silence, lengthier this time.

  “It isn’t even a regular door,” she said, and laughed a curious laugh that sounded almost like a sob.

  “Make up your mind, Oona.”

  “I guess I … I’d like to go upstairs with you,” she said.

  Arnueci turned off the equipment and took off his earphones.

  “There’s another goddamn entrance!” he said.

  Kirk Irving was telling them about a patient he’d had last week, a kid whose molar was growing out of his cheekbone. His wife, Rebecca, said she thought this was a particularly disgusting subject to be discussing while they were eating. Kirk said he didn’t think orthodontics was disgusting, and he reminded Rebecca that it was orthodontics that put the shoes on their daughter’s feet.

  “One of her feet, anyway,” Rebecca said.

  This by way of reminding him that she herself was a breadwinner, although in a more modest way; Rebecca worked as a publicist for a small publishing house in the Village. Kirk turned to Michael and began explaining the long and painstaking process of gradually moving the molar back down into the gum where it belonged. Seizing the opportunity, Rebecca caught Sarah’s attention and began telling her how frustrating it was to have budget limitations that prohibited hi-tech author promotion like satellite tours. Sarah much preferred hearing about the difficulties of touring unknown novelists who wrote everything in first person present, but Kirk’s deeper voice kept bullying through, and she found she was hearing more about orthodonture than she ever cared to learn in a lifetime.

  When Kirk suddenly shifted the conversation to what Michael was working on, she turned to the men at once, hoping to hear something her husband had thus far been reluctant to reveal. But Michael simply shrugged and said, “Oh, the usual, good guys against the bad guys,” and changed the subject at once, telling them he was thinking about renting a small villa in France this year for their three-week summer vacation. This was the first Sarah had heard about it. Normally, she would have leaped at the prospect. But now …

  “Sarah, how marvelous!” Rebecca said, and turned to her at once. “Where? And when are you … ?”

  “Not Provence, I hope,” Kirk said, and rolled his eyes. “That guy’s made a cottage industry of Provence, whatever his name is. I’ll bet it’s like Coney Island now.”

  “I was thinking of the area around St.-Jean-de-Luz,” Michael said. “We went there on our honeymoon. I thought it might be fun taking Mollie there.”

  “Dash over the border to Pamplona for the running of the bulls,” Kirk said, and held up his hands and shook them as if waving a cape.

  “When would this be?” Rebecca asked.

  “Well, I don’t really know,” Sarah said. “Actually, I was …”

  “August sometime, I guess,” Michael said. “That’s when we usually …”

  “I was planning …” Sarah said, and cut herself off when suddenly everyone seemed to turn to her. “I … I thought I might start on my doctorate this summer. This comes as a total …”

  “Honey,” Rebecca said, “screw the doctorate. Take France instead.”

  “It’s just I …”

  “Do you remember Sunset Boulevard?” Kirk asked. “The scene where Gloria Swanson takes him to buy a coat?”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going back to school,” Michael said, sounding somewhat puzzled.

  “You didn’t tell me about France, either,” Sarah said, and belatedly realized how sharp her voice had sounded.

  “Where William Holden is trying to decide whether to take the cashmere or the vicuna?” Kirk said. “And this smarmy salesman with a mustache leans into the shot and says, ‘If the lady’s paying, take the vicuna.’”

  “Take France,” Rebecca said again, and nodded wisely.

  “I suppose I can use the rest,” Sarah said, recovering quickly. “France sounds wonderful to me right now.”

  “Quick study,” Rebecca said, and winked at Michael.

  “She’s been working so hard,” Michael said, and took her hand in his. “Leaves the house at seven each morning …”

  “Well, that’s the job,” she said.

  “But you do have summers off,” Kirk said.

  “. . . doesn’t get home till six most nights. That’s when she …”

  “With pay, no less.”

  “. . . isn’t at a teachers’ meeting,” Michael said.

  “Well, that isn’t too often,” Sarah said.

  “Every week,” Michael said.

  “I’d go on strike,” Rebecca said.

  “Not that often,” Sarah said.

  “Almost,” Michael said.

  “You’re sure she hasn’t got a boyfriend?” Kirk said, and winked.

  “I wish,” Sarah said, and waggled her eyebrows.

  “Has he got a friend for me?” Rebecca asked.

  “Maybe we can take him to France with us,” Michael said, and everyone laughed.

  “You bring the wine,” Kirk said in a thick French accent, “and I’ll bring Pierre.”

  “Lucky Pierre,” Rebecca said, “always in the middle.”

  “Can you get a villa for such a short while?” Kirk asked.

  “I think so. I think you can get them for a week, in fact.”

  “It’s not called a villa in France,” Rebecca said. “It’s called a chateau.”

  “Un chateau,” Kirk said.

  “I thought that was a castle,” Michael said.

  “Same thing,” Rebecca said.

  “Want to come live in a castle with me?” Michael asked, and squeezed Sarah’s hand again.

  It was all she could do to keep from crying.

  Luretta had to tell her. Couldn’t wait till class was over so she could grab Mrs. Welles’s ear and talk with her privately. Last-period class this Wednesday; the entire school running twenty minutes late because of the unexpected fire drill and assembly this morning, two things the kids at Greer could’ve done without on a nice sunny day like today, for a change.

  “. . . no need to write the rest of the poem, am I right?” Sarah was saying. “It’s all there in that first line, ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.’ By the way, if you want to test anyone who’s ever studied English lit, just ask, ‘What are the words that come after “Oh, to be in England”?’ and nine times out of ten, you’ll get ‘Now that spring is there.’ But the words are ‘Now that April’s there,’ and all the longing, all the passion, all the sweet sorrow of that beautiful month, is right there in that first line. As a matter of fact, the rest of the poem is something of a letdown, isn’t it? Ab? Read us the first few lines aloud, would you?”

  Abigail Simms, a lanky fourteen-year-old with straight blond hair trailing halfway down her back, cleared her throat and read, “‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf …’”

  “Hold it right there, Ab, thank you. Now, to how many of you does that business about the lowest bough and the brushwood sheaf conjure any images of April at all? Browning should have quit while he was winning, right?”

  The class watched her warily, suspecting a trap. She had a way of doing that, Luretta knew, leading them down the garden, letting them think one thing, while all the time she was teaching them something just the opposite. But no, this time she really did seem to be sharing her disappointment. She just hoped the class would hurry up and be over so she could t
ell her what was happening at home, Dusty hitting on her all the time, her mother looking the other way.

  “‘. . . and after April,’” she was quoting, “‘when May follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!’ Okay, we all live in the big bad city, we don’t see too many whitethroats or swallows or buttercups waking anew at noontide, but do any of you find those images evocative? Do any of you even know what a whitethroat is? Or a chaffinch? ‘While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough.’ Sally? What’s a chaffinch?”

  Sally Hawkins, looking like a chaffinch herself, whatever that was, tall and spindly with stringy brown hair and bulging brown eyes, a true chaffinch if ever Luretta saw one.

  “Some kind of bird,” Sally said. “I guess.”

  “Any idea what it looks like?”

  “No.”

  “Is it blue? Yellow? Red? Any idea?”

  “No.”

  “Well, isn’t it important for a poet to give us images we can visualize? How about a melon-flower? Anyone here know what a melon-flower looks like? Alyce? Any idea?”

  “It’s something like a squash, I guess.”

  Alyce Goldstein. Cute little girl with dark hair and darker eyes, burdened with the “y” in her name because her mother thought it was more stylish.

  “‘Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!’ That’s the last line of the poem. Where is he, anyway? Browning? The poem is titled ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad.’ So where is he? Is the melon-flower where he happens to be at the time? Or does it grow in England?”

  “It must be where he is.”

  Jenny Larson, thick glasses, freckles all over her face, shy as a butterfly.

  “And where’s that?”

  “Probably Italy.”

  “What makes you say Italy?”

  “The melon-flower makes it sound like Italy. I don’t know why. It just sounds like Italy.”

  “Also he wrote ‘My Last Duchess,’” Amy Fiske said, “and that was about Italy, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, he also wrote ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,’ so how do we know this isn’t Spain? If we know nothing at all about a melon-flower …”

  Luretta found Browning a total bore, even when Mrs. Welles was teaching him. Yesterday, she’d read them the T. S. Eliot poem that began with the words “April is the cruellest month,” and those five words had said more to her than all the words Browning had ever …

  The bell rang.

  “Nuts!” Sarah said.

  Luretta clutched her books to her chest, ran to the front of the classroom, took a deep breath, and said, “Mrs. Welles,” I have to …

  “Honey, can it wait till tomorrow?” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  She was gone almost before the words left her mouth, snapping her attaché case shut, snatching her handbag out of the bottom drawer of the desk, grabbing her topcoat out of the closet near the door, and waving a brief farewell to Luretta as she ran out.

  Luretta supposed it would have to wait till tomorrow.

  She ran the three blocks from Sixtieth to Fifty-Seventh, sure Billy would be gone by now, knowing she would first have to call Andrew, tell him she was on the way, and then try to catch a rush-hour taxi. But miracle of miracles, the car was still there, waiting for her at the curb outside Dunhill’s, where it waited for her every Wednesday at four ten, four fifteen, except that today it was closer to four thirty because of the assembly and the fire drill.

  The poem she’d written was in her handbag.

  She hadn’t seen Andrew in two weeks. She could not wait to be alone with him. She yanked open the back door, slid onto the black leather seat, pulled the door closed behind her, caught her breath, and said, “I thought you’d be gone, Billy, thank you for …”

  “My orders are to wait till the cows come home,” Billy said, and turned the ignition key.

  “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Mr. Farrell,” she said. “Till the cows come home.”

  “Mr. Farrell, huh?” Billy said.

  His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror.

  There was a faint smile on his mouth.

  “Well, those weren’t his exact words,” he said. “Mr. Farrell,” Still smiling. “What he said is I should wait for however long it takes. I just wait, and that’s it.”

  “Does that go for everyone you drive?”

  “No, ma’am, it doesn’t.”

  He had turned the car onto Park Avenue now, heading downtown. The traffic was heavy. She was beginning to think the assembly and fire drill would cost her a lot more than the twenty minutes they’d added to the school day.

  “How long do you wait for other people?” she asked.

  “Depends. If it’s the airport, I wait till the plane gets in, however long it takes.”

  “Do you pick up many people at the airport?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “What if it isn’t the airport?”

  “Twenty minutes, half an hour. I call in, ask if …” He hesitated and then said, “Ask if Mr. Farrell wants me to wait longer or what I should do. Whatever he wants me to do, I do. He’s the boss.”

  She wanted to ask him if he drove many other women. Wanted to ask if his instructions were to wait for as long as it took with any other women but herself. She did not ask. She settled back against the soft black leather, instead, losing herself in the steady drone of the traffic, closing her eyes, lulled almost to sleep until Billy tooted the horn at another car, jolting her immediately back to her senses.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Brooklyn, he wants me to bring you to the Buona Sera,” Billy said, and paused, and grinned into the rearview mirror again. “Mr. Farrell.”

  “The what?”

  “Buona Sera. It’s a restaurant.”

  “A rest—?”

  “Very good one, in fact. Right around the corner, in fact.”

  “A restaurant? I can’t …”

  She was suddenly panicked. A restaurant? Was he crazy? Even in Brooklyn, was he crazy?

  “It’s very nice,” Billy said, “you’ll like it.”

  He was pulling the car up to the curb in front of what looked like the sort of cheap little Italian joint you passed in Queens on the way to Kennedy if there was traffic and you got off the parkway and took the backstreets. Green awning out front, plastic stained-glass windows in the two entrance doors, big ornate metal door pulls that were supposed to look like bronze, a frayed red carpet stretching under the awning, from the curb to the entrance doors. Billy was out of the car already, coming around it now, opening the back door for her. She would not get out of the car, this was ridiculous. Why had he … ?

  Andrew suddenly came through one of the twin entrance doors, stepping out onto the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the curb.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Andrew, what … ?”

  “Time we broke out,” he said, and grinned.

  The moment they were seated, Andrew reached across the table to take her hands. Both hands. He was making no effort to hide. This both frightened her and thrilled her.

  “I have things to tell you,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you have said them in … ?”

  “I wanted to be with you in public.”

  “Why?”

  “To show you off.”

  “Andrew …”

  “To show everyone how beautiful you are. To show everyone how much I love you.”

  “This is very dangerous,” she whispered.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I know we’re in Brooklyn …”

  “That’s why I chose it.”

  “But even so …”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I do worry.”

/>   “Let me tell you what …”

  “Can we please not hold hands?”

  “I want to hold your hands.”

  “I want to hold yours, too. But …”

  “Then don’t worry about it.”

  “Andrew, suppose someone …?”

  “What would you like to drink?” he asked, and signaled to the proprietor, who came sidling obsequiously over to the table, wringing his hands, big grin on his wide round face. They were sitting at a small corner table where a candle burned in a Chianti bottle on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. The proprietor wasn’t quite Henry Armetta in the old black-and-white movies she’d seen on television, but he ran a close second. Hovering over the table, wringing his hands in joy, he seemed to be daring them not to be in love. From speakers discreetly hidden only God knew where, operatic arias suffused the room, audible enough to be heard, soft enough to sound as if they were drifting from open leaded windows above the Grand Canal. The place was relatively crowded for a Wednesday night. There was the pleasant hum of conversation, the clink of silver on china, the smell of good food wafting from the kitchen.

  “Sí, signor faviola,” he said grandly, which she guessed was Italian for “Yes, favored sir,” or “Yes, favorite gentleman,” or something of the sort, favola, faviola, whatever. A solemnly attentive look on his face now, his hands still pressed together, he lowered his voice and gravely said, “Mi dica.”

  “Sarah? What would you like?”

  “Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks,” she said, “a splash.”

  “Beefeater martini on the rocks for me,” Andrew said, “with a couple of olives. Or three or four, Carlo. If you can spare them.”

  “Signore, per lei ci sono mille olive, non si preoccupi,” he said, and went swiftly toward the bar.

  “Do you understand Italian?” she asked.

  “A little.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No. Are you reading my mind?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s part of what I have to tell you.”

  Carlo was back.

  “Bene, signor faviola,” he said. “Ecco a lei un Johnnie Black, con una spuzzatina de seltz, e un Beefeater martini con ghiaccio e molte, molte olive. Alia sua salute, signore, e alia sua, signorina,” he said, and bowed from the waist, and backed away from the table.