by Ray Daniel
Lucy crouched at the base of Sam Adams’s statue, petting a cocker spaniel. The dog’s owner, an older woman wearing a business suit, smiled at the attention and then gave the dog a little tug to continue its walk. Lucy stood and looked around the plaza. When our eyes met, she smiled her brilliant smile. It was a smile that said I’m so happy to see you! It was just what I needed.
I said, “I’d be careful of cocker spaniels. I hear they’re a love ’em and leave ’em breed.”
Lucy said, “I’ll be sure not to get my hopes up. Besides, I don’t think he had a job.”
Lucy threw her arms over my shoulders and pulled me close for a kiss. I responded. The kiss went on for a beat longer than I expected. It was a nice surprise. She pulled back and said, “Somebody’s been drinking.”
“Yeah—Bobby Miller. He was definitely drinking.”
“I see.”
“Let’s get some supper.”
Lucy took my arm as we walked around Faneuil Hall toward Quincy Market. We rounded the corner of the building and winced at the loud drumming of a guy who had inverted a series of buckets and was rapping out a staccato bucket solo. Lucy pulled herself closer to me in response to the auditory assault. Her breast pressed against my arm and thoughts of Sal, JT, and my mother were banished. Lucy and I ran past the bucketeer and into the market, where we were immediately rewarded with one of the best smells in Boston.
Quincy Market houses a long line of exotic food court eateries. We walked into the market and past a brightly colored collection of curries, a raw bar serving clams on the half shell, a submarine sandwich shop, a Regina Pizzeria, and a Mediterranean place that served gyros and falafel. There were cookies, chocolates, beers, wines, roast beef, and boiled lobster. There was a Japanese place that gave free samples, and there was, of course, a Starbucks.
Lucy said, “I don’t know where to start.”
I said, “I think this situation requires a complete reconnaissance before we can make an informed decision.”
We wandered down one side of the food court and back up the other, comparing options and taking note of the especially yummy. We stopped for a beer, then retraced our steps through the market and bought food at the winning eateries. We bought a lobster roll, chicken curry, hummus and pita bread, and an Italian sausage with peppers and onions. For dessert we chose a chunk of fudge and two coffees. Then we walked back to the center of the market and into the great hall.
The rotunda of Quincy Market is like the hub of a propeller. It’s a large, circular, domed room with tables and chairs set up for wandering diners. Staircases swept up the corners to the second level. We climbed the stairs and found a circular eatery, where we sat at a butcher-block table against the railing that overlooked the lower level. The market’s gleaming dome arched above us.
Lucy cut the lobster roll in half and we shared it as we talked.
Lucy bit into her piece of the roll and said, “You haven’t mentioned your brother.”
I said, “I’m trying to forget my brother.”
“Really?”
“Since he showed up, things have gone from good to bad and then bad to worse. Bobby yelled at me, my cousin called me an idiot, some guy named Talevi threatened me with a gun, and my mother slapped me in the face.”
“Oh my God! She did?”
“Yeah. It happens sometimes.”
“Are you okay?”
“She’s a little bit crazy, so I need to cut her some slack.”
“There’s cutting people slack and then there’s allowing yourself to be assaulted.”
“Well, I really can’t call an open-handed smack from a five-foot-tall Italian woman an assault.”
“You can if it’s from your mother.”
I was annoyed. This wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go. I dipped some pita bread into the hummus, ate it, and changed the subject to something lighter.
“Personally, I’m more worried about the guy with the gun,” I said.
“Talevi?”
I said, “Yeah. Bobby says he’s a spy. My cousin Sal seems to know him too, but I can’t see how.”
“Is Talevi Italian?” said Lucy.
“No. He works for the Pakistani embassy.”
“His name ends in an i. Could be Iranian.”
“You think the Mafia’s letting Iranians in?”
Lucy said something, but my brain had gone for a holiday, trying to fit an Iranian spy into an Italian loan-sharking operation. The piece not only didn’t fit in, but it was the wrong size and color. It was like having a puzzle piece with a little skull on it when you were trying to make a puzzle of a kitten hanging onto a rope.
I came back into the conversation and heard the tail end of Lucy saying, “—Pittsfield?”
“Huh?” I said.
“I asked how things went in Pittsfield.”
“Pittsfield was bad,” I said. Then I told her just how bad it was. I ended with the story about my mother being a murder suspect and the slap. When I was done, she was silent.
I said, “I’m a hell of a fun guy, aren’t I?”
Lucy put her hand on mine. “Tucker, you are a great guy and a good man. None of this is your fault. I’m sorry I keep bringing it up.”
“It’s kind of like slowing down to look at a car accident, isn’t it?”
Lucy smiled. “Yeah. A little. Let’s forget about it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
I prepared another bite of lobster roll and asked Lucy about her day at school. She took over and told me about how her high school students were splicing glowing genes into E. coli to make a new form of glowing life. We had never done that in high school.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems that there are things that man was not meant to know.”
“Well, my kids had better know it,” said Lucy.
I munched my food and nodded while she spoke. It was pleasant. Comfortable. We finished up our food and threw away the refuse. As we walked down the staircase, I said, “Let’s go shopping.”
Buying a present was supposed to be the capstone to a beautiful evening. It wasn’t.
Twenty-Eight
Traditions die hard in Boston. Quincy Market was built as a place for pushcart vendors to hawk their wares and, by God, Bostonians were going to maintain that tradition for as long as there were vendors and wares. As a result, pushcarts adorn the outer edge of Quincy Market, protected by a glass lean-to that keeps shoppers warm and dry in the winter and cool and dry in the summer.
I was never one for shopping at the pushcarts. Not that anything was wrong with them, but they specialized in the kinds of trinkets and doodads that tourists buy. I didn’t need a sign that read No Pahking.
Lucy, on the other hand, reveled in the pushcarts. She pulled me from cart to cart, showing me Christmas ornaments, little men made out of corncobs, jewelry fashioned out of beads, and finally a scarf with a long zipper.
The guy at the cart demonstrated. “It starts out as a tube.” He tugged on a zipper that wound around the tube, unrolling it like an apple peel. “Then it unzips to become a scarf.”
Lucy said, “You should like this, Tucker. You’re an engineer.”
At the word engineer, my critical side slipped out. “It’s a zipper.”
“It’s a very clever zipper.”
I wasn’t going to let my evening get derailed over this guy and his zipper, so I stifled the comment that it was still just a zipper and went with, “It’s like a knitted Transformer.”
The guy selling the thing gave me a look. A Transformer? But Lucy was happy to run with the idea.
“Exactly! It’s a Transformer. It transforms from a hood to a scarf.” She wrapped it around her neck and let the tail of it trail over her breast. The scarf was a deep sky blue.
I said, “It matches your eyes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I think it’s very pretty. May I buy it for you?”
Lucy blushed and said, “Why, thank you.”
I paid for the zipscarf, and Lucy and I walked back down among the carts. We were passing a cart full of sports pictures when the beer and coffee caught up with me.
I said, “Excuse me, m’lady. I need to pee.”
Lucy pointed at the restroom sign in the middle of the building and said, “Pee away, m’lord. I’ll be right here tchotchke shopping.
I said, “You go, girl,” and headed to the bathroom sign.
The bathrooms in Quincy Market are in the catacombs under the building. A hallway stretches from one side to the other. So you can leave one set of pushcarts, walk through the restroom hallway, and come up among more pushcarts. The hallway has white tile, and signs hang above the men’s room and the women’s room.
The men’s room starts as a twisty passage that ensures privacy without the need for a door. There is more white tile, and a gizmo that will weigh you for a quarter—perhaps for guys who want to do a before-and-after analysis. Once through the twisty passage, the bathroom opens into a long low rectangle with stalls and sinks to one side and urinals tucked away into a dead end on the other.
The bathroom was empty. Man Law dictated that I walk down into the dead end and take the urinal farthest from the door. This allows other men to use the urinals without having to stand next to you. You only stood next to another guy when there was no other option, and then you kept conversation to a minimum.
I approached the last urinal, unzipped, and started my business. Another guy came into the men’s room. I glanced at him peripherally but kept my eyes on the work in front of me. A cigarette in the urinal beckoned for destruction.
The other guy walked into the urinal cave and said, “Hey, Tucker!”
I looked up and got a glimpse of a narrow bald head. Then my world exploded. A loud cracking sound reverberated through my skull. My head whipped back around from the blow and smacked into the wall tiles.
The guy kicked my knee out from behind, the kneecap hitting the urinal as I folded backward onto the floor. He grabbed me by the shirt front, and I smelt the stink of cigarettes on him. I raised my arms to shield my face, but he hit me again on the side of the head with something hard. His boot caught me in the solar plexus. My eyes crossed. My stomach twisted. Nausea and dizziness overwhelmed me.
The guy grabbed my shirt and pulled my face close. He had yellow teeth, his breath stinking of beer. A black tattoo teardrop bled from the corner of one eye. Teardrop said, “Mind your own fucking business!” Then he dropped my head on the floor, disappearing as I puked across the tiles.
Twenty-Nine
Stitches scraped along the pillow, making a grating sound that drove me from a dreamless sleep. Pain pulsed in my temple, reminding me of my beating. Just before I opened my eyes, I recalled an image of a brass-knuckled fist bearing down on me.
I opened my eyes and lay in my bed, not moving, assessing the damage. My head hurt. My side hurt. I wiggled my toes and flexed my fingers. My right hand hurt. My stomach twitched, but the rest of me was okay. I sat up and looked around the room.
It turned out to be my bedroom. A large framed picture of Fenway Park hung on the wall across from me. A small window faced out over the parking lot behind my building. The trees across the road swayed in the late summer sun. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, resting them on the warm floor, and reconstructed how I had gotten here. My memories were a swirl of police, EMTs, emergency rooms, and Lucy looking horrified as they wheeled me out of the men’s room. Still, she stuck with me. She and Bobby had brought me home and dropped me into bed.
A mug clunked onto the counter in my kitchen. I opened the door, expecting to see Lucy. Instead I saw Jael Navas.
There are all sorts of friends: happy friends, sad friends, childhood friends, interesting friends, sports friends, work friends, and boring friends. In Jael Navas, I was lucky enough to have a deadly friend.
Bobby had hooked me up with Jael back when the Russian Mafia was threatening my life. He knew her from some murky international entanglements and her work for Mossad. Jael had given up that life and become a PI in Boston.
If Jael was sitting in my house, then Bobby thought that things had gotten dangerous.
Jael looked up from her newspaper and said, “You look worse than I had expected.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Agent Miller told me that you had been beaten. But I had not expected stitches.”
“Do they look bad?”
Jael got up from the bar chair to inspect my stitches. At five-ten, she looked me straight in the eye. She had short black hair and wore black jeans with a gray top that came up to her neck. The top’s tight fabric revealed hints of the muscles in her back and arms. Her steady and surprisingly gentle fingers probed my stitches.
“The cut is near the hairline. The scar should be small and easy to hide.”
“Where’s Lucy?”
“Agent Miller drove her home after I arrived.” Jael’s nose twitched. “You should take a shower.”
I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Jael was right about the stitches. There was a crescent cut on the side of my brow up near the hair about a half-inch long. My cheek had a purple bruise, and there was a bump on the back of my head. My ribs hurt where they had been kicked.
I showered and dressed. Ground some Bitches Brew coffee from Wired Puppy, brewed, and poured it. I made us wheat toast and almond butter sandwiches. While we ate, Jael examined Click and Clack, the hermit crabs.
She said, “I assume these are not food.”
“No,” I said. “They’re pets. I doubt they’re kosher.”
Jael, who was an observant Jew, said, “No. They are definitely trayf. I wonder if they should be kept in a kitchen.”
“Even if they have their own silverware?”
Jael watched Clack harvest food bits from his sponge and asked, “Why were you beaten?”
“Bobby didn’t tell you?”
“Agent Miller didn’t know.”
I told Jael the whole story up to yesterday when I had my drink with Bobby. It didn’t get easier in the retelling. In fact, it got worse. I had a dead brother I didn’t know about. My father had a family I didn’t know about. My cousin had an occupation I didn’t know about. My pseudo-uncle had loans I didn’t know about. Yet, despite everything I didn’t know, somebody was worried that I knew too much.
Jael said, “It would be smart to stop asking questions about this.”
I said, “You too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you also going to tell me to quit?”
“No. I do not understand how you could consider quitting after a man has beaten you.”
Jael was right. Some guy had beaten me up. He had shown me that I was unable to keep myself safe, that my face was his plaything. He had snuck up on me while my dick was in my hand and assaulted me. I’d never forget him—his dark skin and teardrop tattoo, his smell, the rough feeling of the skin on his hands as I feebly batted at them and tried to get away. If I found him right now, I’d kill him.
I hated him.
I drank my coffee with a shaking hand and said, “I am bullshit.”
Jael said, “Bullshit? This is not bullshit. This is serious.”
“No. I am bullshit. I’m angry.”
“When Bobby Miller told me that you had been beaten, I knew your enemies had made a mistake.”
“Enemies? I’ve got enemies?”
“People with no enemies rarely get beaten in a toilet.”
“What mistake did they make?”
“They punched the bear.”
“You mean they poked the bear.”
“Yes. They poked the bear.”
&nbs
p; “So now what do I do?”
Jael smiled. “Poke them back.”
Thirty
“It is likely that Hugh Graxton will recognize you. He is very smart,” said Jael. We were driving west on Route 9 in her Acura MDX. Jael drove with smooth, athletic economy. Her eyes flicked constantly across the road and between her mirrors.
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“We have had dealings.”
“Friendly dealings?”
Jael glanced at me. “Graxton is an attractive and charming man.” This was news to me. I had never heard Jael venture any opinion of any man. “He is also dangerous. He cannot be trusted. He makes much of his money from loans.”
“You haven’t told me about your dealings.”
“They were professional.”
“I see.”
Jael drove on. “I do not like your plan,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It is pointless.”
“I’m tired of people lying to me. I want to get an edge. I want to know some information before I start asking questions.”
Jael said nothing and we continued west to Chestnut Hill.
Chestnut Hill is an affluent chunk of neighborhoods that overlie Boston, Newton, and Brookline. It doesn’t exist as a city, but as a place name embedded in the minds of Bostonians. It is home to high-end malls and high-end people, one of the most affluent places on the East Coast.
While my cousin Sal likes to sit in the Cafe Vittoria on Hanover Street, Jael had told me that Graxton liked to sit in a Starbucks in Chestnut Hill near the Longfellow Cricket Club (where they play tennis).
“What does he do in there?” I asked.
“He drinks coffee, surfs the Web, and talks to people.”
“So, he’s like a consultant.”
“Yes. The untrained person will think that he is a businessman.”
I said, “You know, I like to drink coffee and surf the Web.” Then I had told Jael my plan and convinced her to drive me to Chestnut Hill. She pulled into the parking lot, backed into a space, and turned off the car.
