With a kind of glutinous croak, Bristol turned his hand over and said, "After you, dear."
"Gosh," said the woman, taking up the serving spoon. "This smells great. Looks like beef stew."
Madame Mumford accepted this with a placid nod. Bristol grunted.
"Hey Ari, ready for a slice?" Matt held up a slice of beef between a carving knife and prongs. It did not look bad at all. Obviously, neither Tracy nor Matt had taken any part in its conception.
"I'll pass for the moment," Ari said.
"Prime raw from the center, just the way you like it," Matt urged. Ari thought he must be generating a great deal of inner moral suasion to make the offer. An inveterate moocher, it damaged Matt's sensibility to give away anything without the hope for a return. But with Ari sitting only one seat away from Bristol, the boss would overhear him playing the expansive host. Not wanting him to feel rebuffed, or to be seen being rebuffed, Ari allowed his index finger to drift in the direction of the coq au vin. Matt lifted his brows, then shrugged, as though to say, "It's your funeral." Ari fantasized jamming a handful of freedom fries down his throat. But the man was his friend, after all. Or at least a member of the local tribe.
Ari studied the other guests who had gathered at this end of the table. Most of them followed the Mumfords with hungry eyes. Among them was Rebecca. She was smiling broadly, and Ari's heart sank as another portion slipped away from him. It was beginning to seem that everything depended on the repulsive cat-killer, Bruce.
And Bruce was growing feverish. He broke out in a sweat when Madame Mumford lowered the platter next to him. No culinary adventurer, his spirit quavered as he walked the plank. He gave Ari a wincing look, as though trying to get his sympathy. Ari sighed and gave the platter a doubtful look.
It's your funeral.
"Cm'on, Bruce," said Bristol. "This is food for thought."
"I'm on a diet," Bruce grimaced, then spotted Matt, still holding the slice of roast, haplessly searching for an empty plate before the sizzling juice dripped onto his carpet.
"I think Matt needs a hand," he said, lifting his plate and directing it away from Madame Mumford's platter. "Put it here, partner," he said with forced jocularity. The slice landed in Bruce's dish with a heavy plop.
"That's what you want?" Matt asked. "I can get another plate."
"Well, now that it's there..." Bruce sat the plate before him. Feeling Bristol's eyes on him, he added defensively, "Can't let it go to waste."
"Chicken shit," said Bristol. "That's some 'diet'."
Madame Mumford's disappointment was alleviated when Ari raised his plate in both hands, for all the world like an acolyte before an altar.
CHAPTER TWO
"No, we aren't divorced," Rebecca said as she raised another plastic spoonful of pistachio ice cream to her mouth. "We're not separated, either, not legally. We're just...separated."
That someone who so obviously appreciated French cuisine also delighted in green ice cream mystified Ari. He had only tried the dessert once, while taunting one of Uday Hussein's thugs in Cumberland. It had backfired, with Ari spewing out the globular mess in disgust. Throughout his military career, he had been compelled to eat some pretty nasty things, but nothing as nasty as that.
It had been Rebecca's idea to meet at the Baskin-Robbins on Forest Hill Road, not realizing the ice cream parlor held a painful memory for him and an even more painful memory for Karen Sylvester, whom he had almost killed in the parking lot. Luckily, the girl behind the counter was not the same sales clerk who had witnessed his attack on the deputy marshal. Elsewise, the police would already be racing to the scene.
Ari found Rebecca's reasoning for meeting here both logical and twisted. She could not bring herself to go to his house because neighbors might see and misinterpret, and she did not want him at her house for the same reason. Besides, how could she explain to Diane inviting into her house the very man she had forbidden her to visit? Best to meet on neutral ground and give the appearance of a chance encounter. This would give her the opportunity to explain to her daughter that Mr. Ciminon wasn't so bad, after all. That Mr. Ciminon, who had chased Diane away from his house and shown every indication of being a madman was...well, a bit different, but all-in-all not so bad...for a person of non-American persuasion.
This explanation met with mixed success, as evidenced by Diane's gasp when Ari walked into the parlor and gave them a startled, pleasant smile.
"Ah, Yellow Rose Diane!" he had pronounced grandly. "I see we are both connoisseurs of fine ice cream."
"I like lots of ice cream," said Diane tentatively, shading close to her mother.
"We don't come here very often," said Rebecca, giving her daughter a tweak on the nose. "Ice cream is good in moderation."
She made it sound like opium.
"How is Marmaduke?" Ari asked, and mentally shot himself in the forebrain. The cat was the central bone of contention between Ari and Diane. It was truly a source of self-discovery, to find one's self drawn to an animal that, in his meager feline brain, did not care a fig for him. But next to his wife and son (and Abu Jasim, although the jury was still out on that particular individual), Sphinx had become central to Ari's life. A concept so bizarre that Ari wondered at his own sanity. Animals were things, to be used and discarded as the occasion arose, the same way hunters cut old beagles adrift to die lost and alone in the woods. Cats? They weren't even useful, unless one considered rodent control. And Ari had seen no rats or mice in his neighborhood. Which might be due, of course, to the cats.
The impracticality of Rebecca's idea to meet at the parlor became quickly apparent. There were things she wished to discuss with Ari that she did not want Diane to overhear. This would be virtually impossible within the confines of the window-encased dining area.
And then luck played its hand. Either that, or Rebecca was showing a remarkable talent for duplicity. Soon after Ari arrived, another woman with a small girl arrived. A girl who just happened to be one of Diane's close friends. A mother who just happened to give Rebecca a meaningful nod. Diane bounced up and down in her seat, begging her mother to be allowed to sit with her friend. Rebecca just happened to acquiesce and Diane ran down the aisle to the far end of the dining area, her French vanilla cone balanced precariously in her small hand.
"Nicely arranged," Ari nodded admiringly once he and Rebecca were alone. She would have been a suitable candidate for the SSO.
"I'm not a devious person," she responded.
"Of course not," said Ari, thinking, Forget Al-Amn al-Khas...what about the CIA?
"I was misinformed about the divorce," said Ari as Diane flounced away. He would have scolded her with a frown had he been given the opportunity.
"You have to be emphatic with children," said Rebecca apologetically. "They don't understand gray."
Ari was a little bit of a novice on gray, himself. In the Iraq of his upbringing there was either black or white. You were either alive or dead. Perhaps that was what made America great. It was spasmodically gray.
"Diane's father..."
Curious. Not 'my husband'. Ari wondered if she was unconsciously announcing her availability. Not to him, but as a test of what her future might hold. Perhaps clothing stores should add a new section. Petite, Large, Divorcée....
"I'm not clear on this," said Ari. "Of what advantage is it to tell Diane her father will not be back?"
"I tried the other way first, letting her think he might come through the door any time. She became so wound up that every noise she heard was Daddy trying to get back inside. The day you came knocking at our door, she thought Ethan had forgotten his key and she was racing to let him in."
"But you stopped her because you thought there was a madman at the door...?" Ari cast his eyes over the tubs of ice cream within the glass counter.
"I didn't know who was at the door."
"You didn't want her to open the door to a stranger...?" Ari persisted.
"All right, I thought it might be Ethan."
"Which only added to your disappointment when you saw...me."
"My reaction was less than gracious," she said, deflecting Ari's smile with one of her own. He thought very few people failed to improve their appearance when they smiled. The Vice President might look like evil incarnate when he forced a grin, but the President shined like a little boy.
"It was perfectly understandable." He sought an explanation that would suit American ears, and came up with the all-purpose, "I was under a lot of stress. It must have shown."
"No kidding. You took the beating of a lifetime."
"Oh, it wasn't all that bad." No, just beaten to within an inch of my life.
"I won't say 'if you say so', because I know it isn't so. That was stress par excellence. But we weren't talking about your behavior."
"Ah, but you were under much stress, too."
Rebecca was in her late twenties, fresh and attractive. She must have made a favorable impression on Bristol when she appeared at office parties with her husband. There was a juvenile element to the way men displayed their wives, like kids showing off their toys. Ari had behaved similarly at one time, until it became apparent how dangerous it was to show off one's beautiful spouse in the Republican Palace...especially when a sexual predator who wielded immense power was in the vicinity. Someone like Uday Hussein, who on several occasions had approached Rana, flashing his bucktooth grin and making his intentions clear. But Uday no longer presented a problem. Ari had seen to that.
"At least I wasn't beaten," Rebecca sighed.
"When one has lost contact with one's husband or wife, it comes to the same thing," Ari said from experience.
"That finally brings us to the point of being here," Rebecca nodded, staring at her empty cup. She glanced up. "Aren't you going to have anything? I hate eating in front of you like this."
"In the cafés of Paris, one can sit all day with no more than a couple of espressos…"
"Paris?" She lifted a hand to point at the liquor store next door and the strip mall across the street. "We don't offer much competition. None, actually. Here, you have to spend money or vamoose."
"'Vamoose?'" Ari inquired, liking the sound of the word.
"Skedaddle."
Context was everything and Ari nodded, adding these two new words for a hasty departure to his vocabulary. He was preparing to rise for a better look at the ice cream tubs when Diane sidled up, giving Ari a hard glance before telling her mother, "My cone was real small."
"You think so?" Rebecca answered skeptically.
Diane had treated Ari with brusque assertiveness when she came to his house in search of Sphinx. With her mother, however, she was more circumspect. Her reasoning was softer, as though she was luring a mouse out of its hole, a tricky procedure that failed more often than not. But the seeming courtesy did not change Ari's mind about her, which was that she was a wicked handful.
Seeing the answer to her dilemma, Rebecca revoked her doctrine of moderation. She got up and paid for another cone for her daughter, thereby remaining a paying customer. Diane retreated with greedy pleasure to join her friend.
"We'd better rush things along or I'll have to get her more. She'll gobble everything in sight until she barfs."
"'Those who cannot control themselves must be controlled by others'," said Ari, quoting 2,000 years' worth of conservative commentators.
"Her father controlled her better than I ever could." Rebecca took a deep breath. "I wanted to ask you about your acquaintances on the police force. Could you ask them to discretely..."
Ari, who had no intention of discrediting himself by involving Officers Mangioni and Jackson in a search for a runaway husband, nodded sagely. "I will have to give them some details, you see. First of all, do you have a picture of him with you?"
"I brought the most recent one." Removing a small photograph from her purse, she looked briefly towards the rear of the parlor and saw Diane had her back to them. She handed the 4x6 to Ari.
"Does he always leer like this?"
"Hmmmm?" She leaned forward for a closer inspection. "Oh. I never thought of it as leering. But now that you mention it...it doesn't make him look very trustworthy, does it?"
"Perhaps he was only pleased to have you with him," Ari said, politely putting a good face on a face that reminded him of...of...he looked at the far wall. Why, Diane....
"Bristol took that picture last year, not long before he fired Ethan. Maybe he saw the same thing you do." She frowned, as though in pursuit of a judgment she was reluctant to catch. "It was the annual Sayed picnic. We were three sheets in the wind."
Ari wondered how the wind could have affected the portrait. Besides, the wind must have died down the moment the shutter button was pressed. Rebecca's long brown hair was lying undisturbed on her shoulders, while Ethan was perfectly unmussed. Ari's mental eye narrowed in suspicion. If Rebecca was going to lie to him, why would it be over something so frivolous?
"Uh...I see you're a little confused. Diane told me your English was a little rough. 'Three sheets in the wind' means being drunk."
"I was just remarking that," said Ari with a little cough and scrutinizing the picture again. And indeed, the couple seemed a little bleary-eyed. He wanted to know where the phrase came from. It was probably untranslatable. But there was no time for etymology.
"What do you know about your husband's work at Sayed?"
"What would that have to do with him running off with another woman?" Her unplanned bluntness caused Rebecca to blush. "Yes, it's that brutally simple. If you're fishing for a character sketch, I think he proved what he was made of by running off with a Chinese girl."
"I'm coming into this frigid," said Ari. "I would like to take things in order."
"I think you mean you're coming into this 'cold'," Rebecca grinned. There was nothing of a leer in it. In fact, it was rather forgiving. "All right, but I can't tell you much. Diane already knows more about computers than I ever will."
"Do you know anything about why he was fired? Bristol was very vague."
"I know Ethan's version," Rebecca shrugged. "I believed it at the time and 'poor-babied' him. He said that Bruce—Ethan's direct supervisor—wanted to cancel his access to all the corporate accounts they were working on. In other words, he didn't trust him. He said he thought Ethan was using privileged contact information to send bogus emails. Sayed was considered a trusted source by all those customers, so if they opened an email with an attachment...and the attachment had a virus..."
"Is this the 'phishing' Bristol was talking about?"
"I guess."
"What do you think of Bristol Turnbridge and Bruce Turner?"
"Other than that they share the same initials?"
"That is a curiosity," Ari nodded.
"Bristol started a business from scratch, which means he's probably an asshole. And Bruce does what Bristol tells him, which makes him a mini-asshole."
"That seems harsh," Ari observed. "I have been informed that America is based on the entrepreneurial spirit."
"You've been watching Nightly Business Report."
"I don't own a TV, if you're speaking of a television broadcast."
"Diane told me your house was pretty empty, but I didn't know it was that empty." She gave him a mildly distrustful look, as though some of her doubts about him were on the verge of being confirmed. "But maybe that's how we should all live. The 'entrepreneurial spirit'? Sometimes I wonder if we'd be better off living in caves."
"Caves are boring, Mrs. Wareness. Sicily is full of caves. That was where many Greek prisoners were kept during the tragic war with Athens. They all perished, many from boredom."
"Believe it or not, I know what you're talking about. I minored in European History."
"Ah," said Ari appreciatively.
"And maybe I'm being too hard on Bristol and Bruce..."
"But the assholes fired your husband."
"Exactly."
"Do you believe your husband's version of events…after hav
ing reflected upon them?"
"Sometimes your English is rough and sometimes you're straight out of 10 Downing Street," said Rebecca in an amused tone. "To tell you the truth, I don't know what to believe. The Central Virginia Group believed in him enough to hire him on the spot. And that's their in-house fraud department, which investigates people they think are scamming the company. I don't know what kind of resume he gave them, but it must have been convincing. They must have vetted him. Do you want the name of his boss and the address? I've written it out."
"Please."
She handed him a slip of paper. He glanced down and read.
"This Elmore Lawson..."
"His boss, and a more perfect asshole you'll never meet."
Ari seriously doubted this.
"You're including Bristol in this assessment?"
"I tried phoning Lawson, but he wouldn't take my calls. So I went in person and his secretary told me that Lawson doesn't see anyone. Anyone! I ran past her and tried the office door, but it was locked. I tried to explain to this bug-eyed secretary that my husband was an employee, that he had vanished."
"Ah, 'vanished'."
"Yes. And she threatens to call security on me!"
"This sounds very unusual," said Ari.
"Well duh! I even tried to set up an appointment. This twit said Lawson doesn't see anyone, ever! I asked who his boss is, and she said they were a separate division, like subcontractors, and that Lawson was his own boss!" She leaned across the small table. "Well fuck!"
"Indeed," said Ari.
"My guess is that Ethan and this Lawson dipwad are buddies, and that Lawson is covering his good buddy's ass."
"How did you reach this conclusion?"
"Ethan slipped up big-time. I checked my online Verizon account and I spotted a number I didn't recognize. I called. And some Chinese bitch answered."
The pleasant, sociable Rebecca that Ari had first met when entering the ice cream parlor had been transformed into a malevolent virago. Betrayal had a way of making its victims quite ugly. It was possibly the worst aspect of the crime.
"Would you happen to remember this phone number?"
Cold Snap Page 5
