“Well, I can tell you what he said to me when I called his attention to it. ‘I don’t give a fig,’ is what he said. ‘These are the kind of angels Alix loves, and these are the clouds she thinks are so beautiful.’ That’s an exact quotation.”
Alix managed a faint smile. “Fig?”
“All right, I may have paraphrased just a bit, but that was the substance of it. Was that the case? Did you love the Mannerists’ treatment of clouds?”
“Did I? They do seem a little gloomy for a twelve-year-old, but maybe I did. I really can’t remember.”
“Well, whatever the case, I was there, my dear. I watched him paint it myself. Truly.”
“I just wish you’d told me that in the first place instead of letting me blather on like that.”
“Not at all, your speculations are always entertaining,” Geoff said with no trace of sarcasm. “And this was a reasonable one. It just doesn’t happen to be the case.”
They finished their coffees without saying more, and continued to sit there a few moments longer, sunk in their own reflections.
“Geoff,” Alix said as they gathered themselves to leave, “if Tiny is running away from something, where would he run to? Does he still have family in New York?”
“Yes, but I believe he’s estranged from them. I do know that he has some contacts—old friends, family, I’m not sure what they are—in San Francisco. There was a Wilfred . . . a Wilmer . . . something like that, whom he used to talk about—in North Beach, Little Italy. That’s where he’d go when he needed to get away for a while in the, well, in the—”
“The ah, mm, old days?” Alix suggested.
“Exactly.” He tipped his head to one side and frowned. “Dillard? Could it have been Dillard? No, I don’t think so. Wallace . . . ?”
“Dad, let me ask you: what chance do you really think we have of finding him?”
Geoff considered. “I think the more pertinent question is: should we be trying to find him at all? Isn’t it possible that by searching for him we might be bringing him more trouble than he’s already in? As you implied, if he wants our help, all he need do is call us—either of us.”
“No, I’m sorry, Geoff, that’s just not good enough. If Tiny is in trouble—and he must be in trouble—and especially if it has something to do with that mirror, I can’t simply sit here and wait until he calls. Any lead I can find to him, I’m going to follow.”
“Such as going to San Francisco yourself, do you mean?”
“If that makes sense, yes.”
“And if you were to find him, what would you do?”
“See that he has some money, I suppose, or help him however I can. Advice, information . . . I don’t know. You said yourself, the man would jump out of a window for me. Don’t you think this is the least I can do for him?”
Geoff sighed but said nothing.
“If you’re worried that I might do something stupid—dangerous—don’t be, because I won’t. I promise. Trust me on that.”
He nodded, seemingly as much in approval (she hoped) as in resignation. “That’s my daughter,” he said. “One would think I’d be used to her by now. Go to it then, my dear. You have my blessing. If you can think of any way that I can help, you’ll tell me.”
“I will, and thank you.” She covered his hand with hers. “Come on, I’ll drive you back.”
“I wish you luck in this, you know that,” he said as they walked to her car. “But FBI help notwithstanding, I have to tell you that if Tiny doesn’t want to be found”—he slowly shook his head—“nobody’s going to find him.”
CHAPTER 9
I have to tell you that if Tiny doesn’t want to be found . . . nobody’s going to find him.
But Alix thought otherwise. As soon as she got back to her apartment, the naked walls of which shocked her all over again—she’d have to get something up on them as quickly as she could—she climbed up on the step stool in the entry closet and rummaged on the messy overhead shelf. She had to shove out of the way a tennis racket that hadn’t been used in a year, a non-functioning printer, and a small cork bulletin board still in its wrapper (now why had she bought that?) in order to extract an old shoebox, softened and sagging with age, from behind them. Then she took the box to her dining room table with more care than beat-up old shoeboxes generally got.
For this was no ordinary shoebox, this was the very box in which those original Bottega Venetas had come, the ones her mother had bought her for her sixteenth birthday. Like Tiny’s mirror, this box was one of the very few things that she’d managed to keep with her all these years—a treasured possession, laden with memories. She hadn’t thought about it in months, though, not since the day she’d moved into the condo, and handling it now brought many of those memories back.
That day in 2000, when she’d watched so proudly as the clerk gently nestled those shoes back into the box, had been even more meaningful than she’d realized at the time. Until then, until that very day, she’d seen herself as her daddy’s girl, captivated by Geoff’s wit, flamboyance, and raffish irreverence for convention. Her decorous, unostentatious mother, Rachel, on the other hand, was old-money New England stock—a van Hoogeren, no less—and acted like it, her natural liveliness dulled by rules of proper behavior for every conceivable situation, rules that Alix had heard so many times that she’d stopped listening—stopped hearing, even—by the time she was ten.
And that day was to be no different. Alix had fallen in love with the shoes the moment she’d seen them, but she’d been raised to be frugal despite the family wealth, and when her mother asked if those were the ones she wanted, Alix had expressed her hesitancy.
“Yes, but four hundred dollars for a pair of shoes? It’s so much . . .”
“I have a rule for clothing purchases, Alix,” her mother responded. “Now that you’re a young lady, it’s time for you to begin following it. And that rule is . . .”
Alix barely managed to stifle the by-now automatic urge to roll her eyes. Rachel’s “rules” were invariably less like rules and more like mini-sermons.
“Buy infrequently,” her mother intoned, “but when you do buy, never look for the latest frippery. The more popular the style, the sooner it will be out of fashion. Buy quality, both in manufacturing and in quiet good taste, and take care of it. It will last you for years, it will simplify your life, and you’ll be the happier for it, I promise you.”
The funny thing was that, whatever the reason, for once her mother got through to her, and all the other long-disregarded rules fell into place behind it. It was the “quiet good taste” part that had done it. At base, wasn’t that what all of Rachel’s rules were about? And what was so bad about that?
It was at that moment that she began to understand that, while she adored Geoff and his ways and had even made some not very successful efforts to emulate him, at heart she herself was more her mother’s daughter, valuing privacy, simplicity, refinement—and yes, quiet good taste—more than the restless exhilarations of her father’s brilliant world. The realization had been a life-changer, freeing her to be her own person from then on.
She looked lovingly and nostalgically at the box as she set it on the table. In it was not the usual hodgepodge of rubber bands, paper clips, out-of-date grocery coupons, and canceled checks for which retired shoeboxes were generally put to use, but only memorabilia in the truest sense of the word: things genuinely worthy of remembrance. As a result, there wasn’t that much in it—personal photographs, significant postcards and letters, ticket stubs and programs from outings with people who’d been important to her.
Thus, she quickly found what she was looking for. It was a photo taken inside an old-fashioned Italian delicatessen, its shelves crammed with bottles and jars going up to the ceiling, and in front of them, hanging from hooks, dozens of variously sized salamis thickly coated with rich white mold, and interspersed with russet-brown smoked hams in string netting. Simply looking at the picture, you could practically smell the place
. And in the immediate foreground, standing in front of a long sales counter and brandishing a squat, straw-basketed bottle of Chianti by the neck in one gigantic paw and a foot-long hero sandwich in the other, was Beniamino Guglielmi Abbatista. From the goofy, lopsided grin on his face, Alix had concluded that there probably wasn’t much left in the bottle. From behind the counter, a young blond clerk at the slicing machine was laughingly shouting something at him.
It was the only photo of Tiny she had—in fact, the only photo of him she’d ever seen. He’d mailed it to her when she was twelve, during one of the several times he had disappeared from her life for a few weeks without warning. (This was in the, ah, mm, old days.) There had been no letter with it, only a penciled note on the back, painstakingly—and somewhat painfully—printed in block letters. It was easy to imagine him sitting with his tongue peeking from the side of his mouth while he worked at it with the stub of a pencil.
Dear Alix,
I am fine. I thought you would like this nice photagraph of me and my freinde Waldo. This is my favroite deli in the whole world and is right around the corner from my house where I live for a little whiole. Lucky me, huh? I hope evreything is alright with you and your mamma and papa. I miss you very much. Soon I see you.
Your loveing Zio Beni. XXOO
She studied the picture for a while, smiling to see him so young. With his black, organ-grinder’s mustache and a nose like a potato, he’d have fit right in with the Mario Brothers. He still had the potato-nose, but the mustache was gone and his hair had thinned and now had more gray than black in it. And she’d forgotten how dense (and delightful) his accent had been then. Although he’d been raised in New York, his parents could barely get along in English, he’d told her, and Italian had been the only language spoken in the Abbatistas’ apartment. As a result, Tiny spoke both languages, but each heavily accented by the other. Since then, she realized now, his English had come a long, long way.
But it wasn’t to look at Tiny that she’d gotten the picture down. What she was interested in was a proprietary placard that she thought she remembered being on one of the shelves behind his left shoulder. And she was right; there it was, big and bright: G.G. Zappa & Figli, dal 1896, in the proud red, white, and blue of the American flag. Now, if Geoff was right about San Francisco being where Tiny went when he needed to beat a retreat . . .
On her laptop she opened up Google Search, reasoning—hoping—that if a delicatessen had already stuck it out for almost eighty years at the time of the photo, it just might still be there.
“Yes!” she exulted when it popped right up on Fodor’s San Francisco Shopping page: Zappa’s Delicatessen, established in 1896 in San Francisco’s Little Italy, may well be the last of the true Italian salumerias . . .
She sat back, much satisfied and flushed with elation. If this was his “favorite deli in the whole world,” and he was a familiar enough face there that one of the clerks would be mugging so openly with him, wasn’t it just possible that some old-timer in an old-timey place like that might know something about him, even have some idea of where he was now?
And even if there wasn’t anybody there who still knew him, there was another clue on the back of the photo. Assuming that “right around the corner” wasn’t just a figure of speech—and the literal-minded Tiny wasn’t much for airy locutions—then that meant the house he’d been staying in was . . . well, right around the corner, and how hard would it be to check on the buildings that met that description? She knew what those places in North Beach’s residential Italian neighborhoods were like: not big tenement-style apartment buildings, but modest little houses converted in the fifties and sixties to hold two or three apartments each, with the occasional rambler of a Victorian that might be split up into five or six apartments.
In the best of all possible worlds, he was there now. If not, she was betting there’d be someone who could give her some kind of clue to his whereabouts—if she could get whoever it was to trust her. Knocking on every door in an entire block would be a big job, but it was certainly doable—especially if she had someone to help her.
She reached for the landline telephone on the table beside her and punched in a familiar number. It was picked up on the second ring.
“H—”
“Chris, hello! Listen, could you get away for a few days later this week, or even better, tomorrow, to go down to San Francisco? I’m worried about Tiny, he’s been missing for days—it’s got to have something to do with that mirror, don’t you think? Even Geoff doesn’t know where to find him. We went to where he lives, but he wasn’t there, but I’ve got an idea, only I could really use your help. I’m afraid that . . .”
It occurred to her that under normal circumstances Chris would have said something by now. “Chris? Are you there? Hello?”
“Oh, am I allowed to speak too?”
“Sorry, I guess I’m a little keyed up.”
“No kidding, really? Now. Take a deep breath, slow down, and start all over again.”
It took five minutes to explain and another five to work out the logistics, at the end of which they agreed to fly down to the City by the Bay the next morning. They would start with a reconnaissance visit to Zappa’s Delicatessen in hopes of digging up something on Tiny, and take it from there.
Chris tried to book a ShareJet for the flight, but despite the fact that she had a couple of “ins” with the company (she was a stockholder and her husband, Craig, was one of their senior pilots), there was nothing available on such short notice. In the meantime, Alix had found an early-morning flight on Alaska Airlines and suggested that she just book it on her laptop.
“What time?”
“Seven-thirty?” Alix offered without much hope.
As she expected, this plan failed to fly. “Are you out of your mind?” Chris yelled. “We’d have to be at the airport by six, which means I’d have to get up and start getting my face on at . . . at . . . my God . . .”
“All right, I get the message. Let’s see.” She prowled through Expedia. “Eight-ten?”
An indecisive pause and then: “Keep going.”
“Well, there’s one at nine-thirty, but that doesn’t get there till noon, which kind of cuts our workday short, don’t you think?”
“That’s all right, get that one. I’ll work fast, you’ll see. So be downstairs ready for pickup at, oh, seven-fifteen, then. But get us first-class on the plane. I’ll pick up the extra tab.”
“Checking . . . checking . . .” Alix mumbled.
“Oh, and hey,” Chris said, “do you know the Inn at Union Square down there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My favorite place. Not real expensive—well, considering it’s right off the square. You’ll like it too. Is it okay with you if I get us a couple of rooms there?”
“Sure . . . Oops, sorry, no first-class available on that flight. The best I can do is a pair of coach seats together. Think you can stand a couple of hours flying like the rest of us?”
“Quel horreur,” moaned Chris with a heavy sigh. “What I don’t do for my friends.”
Alix laughed. “You can have the aisle seat.”
As soon as she disconnected from Chris, Alix switched from her landline phone to her cell so she’d have one hand free to start packing while she made her next call. She brought up the FBI art squad on her contacts list. There were only two names: Ted’s, of course, and Jamie Wozniak’s. It was Jamie she’d be calling, but catching a glimpse of Ted’s name at the top of the page sent a lovely little chill up her spine and put a tiny, self-satisfied smile on her face. How very lucky she was. What a rocky start it had been with him, and how wonderfully it had all turned out. Ted: decent, accomplished, manly, sexy, funny, caring, intelligent . . . as far as she was concerned, there weren’t enough adjectives in the thesaurus to do him justice. And, ha-ha, world, he was all hers, “for as long as we both shall live,” as they’d promised just, what was it, four days ago? Despite the unsettling events of the in
tervening days, she couldn’t remember ever having four days filled with such bursting happiness.
Jamie was the art squad’s “operations specialist,” a laughable misnomer, since what she truly was was Ted’s all-around generalist: his go-to person when computer skills were needed, or information-ferreting abilities, or cut-through-the-bureaucracy savvy when you really needed to get things done right now. More than that, Jamie had become a good friend of Alix’s, the only person other than Chris who knew about the marriage. She’d served as a witness at the ceremony.
“Missing him already, are you?” were Jamie’s first words after the hellos.
“Desperately,” Alix replied, “although, believe me, there have been enough strange things going on around here to keep my mind fully occupied.”
“Strange? What does that mean? Tell me what’s happened.”
The abrupt change in tone didn’t surprise Alix. This was a woman who could switch to an utterly focused, all-business mode in a tenth of a second. It was one of the things that made her so good at her job. And it was tremendously reassuring. You knew at once that you were in good hands.
Alix went through it all for her: the telephone call from Ferrante in Italy, the burglary, Tiny’s troubling disappearance, and Chris and Alix’s plan to search for him. “And we can sure use your help, Jamie. Finding him’s not going to be easy, so I’m hoping you might be able to get some additional information on him for us—anything that might help us hunt him down.”
“You bet. Tell me what you do know about him.”
“Not much, considering how close we are. My father’s his oldest, most intimate friend, and he barely knows any more than I do.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “Full name is Beniamino Guglielmi Abbatista—”
“One b or two bs?”
“Two. In his late fifties, I’d say. Big guy . . . huge, really, six-four, three hundred pounds—”
The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4) Page 7
