“Actually, the man who runs this is a well-known chef.”
“Really?” Lou looked disappointed. “How do you know?”
“I’ve eaten here a lot.”
“Were you a student?”
“I took some classes years ago,” Nicola said. He nodded, sipping his latte, and waited for her to say more. Obviously he was in no rush. As far as he knew she was someone—who?—there to agree to his terms.
Nicola blew on her coffee. Well, he could bring up the topic whenever he liked, he could talk about food forever, that was fine with her. She knew she looked good and she felt great, her adrenaline was up, and although she was tired she hardly felt it. Also her skirt was the exact right amount of tightness, just enough so she felt it without being binding.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Lou said. He was looking at the inside of the muffin. Around them students began talking about art supply places, and although they were loud there was a friendly, uplifting tone to their talk. Their artwork hung everywhere—in the courtyard, in the hallways, in the bathrooms (the toilet seats featured colorful embalmed fish)—and the café tables were stained with smears of paint. It was beginning to get crowded; soon someone would sit with them.
“Maybe we should talk about Scott,” Nicola said.
“I can’t do business while I’m eating,” Lou said. “Let’s walk down to the wharf after this.”
* * *
Nicola got a refill of coffee and took it with her when they were ready to go. Outside the sky was white with fog and they crossed Columbus Avenue then walked down the hill toward the bay, following the cable car tracks. They passed the soft-shell crab restaurants and the souvenir hat and T-shirt shops and the racks of postcards and dangling cable car key chains and then they walked out onto the wooden pier.
Lou was not much taller than she was—a couple of inches maybe. Nicola liked that; it made them seem more equal somehow. They stopped halfway down the pier and Nicola sat down on a bench overlooking the water. In the distance she could hear seals barking for popcorn or whatever it was tourists were feeding them.
She wrapped her hands around her cardboard cup. It was windy and cold and she couldn’t see much past the few ships that were permanently docked—a submarine and an old navy clipper. Lou wore a comfortable-looking suede jacket.
“Would you like to wear my coat?” he asked.
“I have on silk underwear,” she said, and looked at him. She wanted to see him look surprised; she wanted to throw him off a little bit before they began. But Lou’s expression didn’t change. He watched her steadily, waiting for more.
“Which is very warm,” she finished.
He smiled then, and looked out at the water. She wasn’t sure if he was disconcerted or not. She took a sip of her coffee but it was still too hot.
“You really should have tried their lattes,” he said. “They were excellent.”
“In what way?”
“A good combination of hot liquid with full flavor. Some places think a high degree of heat is enough.”
“That last needs some rewording,” Nicola said.
Lou got out his notebook and wrote something down. The seagulls called to each other without stopping and there was a heavy clang of boat equipment—an anchor chain hitting the side of the dock. Soon the tourists would arrive wearing thick sweatshirts and baseball caps. Nicola looked at the band of restaurants along the south shore.
“So can we talk about Scott now?” she asked.
“Is he prepared to agree to whatever terms you and I come to?”
“He agrees.”
“Then let’s get started,” Lou said. He opened his briefcase. “Here’s his bill.”
Nicola looked at it, then frowned. “It’s a little higher than he led me to believe.”
“It always is.”
She read it over carefully. One loan was incurred three years before.
“We offer an initial two-month grace period and you’ll notice our terms of interest are not exorbitant; they’re very competitive,” Lou was saying. “And here’s a form you can fill out if for any reason you need to miss a payment—if you submit this within two weeks you are eligible for another two-month grace period, pending review. Just check the applicable category: death, illness, emotional turmoil. We’re usually good for one per year. Oh, and here, I guess I can give you this.” Lou shuffled through his briefcase and took something out.
“A complimentary key ring. We also have movie coupons but I seem to be out.”
Nicola said nothing. Lou must have thought she was stalling because he said, “Should I show you where to sign?”
“No I don’t think so.” She handed him back the bill. “I have a proposition for you, Lou.”
Lou raised his eyebrows.
“I can pay off Scott’s loan today, right now if you want,” she said. “In return for a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a problem. My landlord wants to evict me. He served me a notice that stated that one of his family members wants to move into my house, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think he has any family members, in which case this is an unlawful eviction. I’ve lived in the house for four years, and the first two years I lived with a friend who had lived there alone for three years before that. In all that time—seven years—rent prices on the open market have gone up over eighty percent.”
“How much do you pay now?”
“Let me just say that I think my landlord could get eight hundred dollars more a month for the house. And I would pay eight hundred dollars or more a month for a comparable situation. There have been cases where landlords in the Mission District have paid their tenants thousands of dollars to move out so they could raise the prices to market levels. In some places they were able to triple the rent. Triple it.”
“Why don’t you just buy a house?”
“With twelve thousand dollars?” Nicola asked. “Maybe if I were married and my husband and I both had high salaries and we were willing to take on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage, maybe then I could.”
Lou watched a seagull pick at some gum on the ground a few feet away. “So what’s the favor,” he asked.
“I would like you to help me prove my landlord has no family members, or at least none in the area, and none that want to move in.”
“What makes you think I can do that?”
“Your profession. You follow people, right? You dig up a little dirt, you scare them.”
“All I do is keep track of people and every once in a while remind them what they owe,” he said mildly. “They bring their own fear.”
She watched him watching the seagull. “I think you can help me,” she said. “I imagine you find people who don’t want to be found, and that must take some skill.”
The seagull stopped picking at the gum and flew off. Lou turned back to Nicola.
“And in return you’ll give me twelve thousand dollars,” he said.
“Which I’ll save up again in just over a year if my rent doesn’t increase. After that I can start saving again. But if I have to start paying eight hundred dollars more every month in rent I might as well leave the city; I’ll never be able to save a dime.”
“But the twelve thousand dollars, the money you’ll give me, that’s mine anyway,” Lou said. “It’s money Scott owes me. Why should I do anything more to get it?”
“Have you ever gotten money from Scott?”
“I’ve gotten a lot of money from a lot of people.”
“Yes, but it takes time, and from Scott it will take a lot of time. Believe me, I know this. And your time is valuable,” Nicola said.
“It’s really not that valuable.”
“Maybe to your uncle it is.”
Lou looked at the pier again and again Nicola waited out the silence. She liked his deliberate motions; she felt he was competent, he could be counted on. At the same time there was something casual about him; she could almost see him on a surf board. Someo
ne she might have gone to school with. He was not a loan shark by nature, or if he was then the whole business seemed tame and orderly, men who sold a product—money—then delivered the bill.
“How long have you been in this business anyway?” she asked.
“Only a couple of years.” Lou smiled. “I needed a job after I was kicked out of law school.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well, actually I just left, but being kicked out sounds better.”
He got up to walk her back to her car. As they left the pier he said, “We usually count on a few months of interest. If you could kick that in, then I’ll do it.”
“A few or a couple?”
“Three.”
“I can do that,” Nicola said. She had been prepared to go as high as five.
“But what if your landlord is telling the truth?” Lou asked.
“If he is, then I’ve lost my investment. But my belief in humanity will have risen.”
She smiled at him. The wind had died down and the sun was coming out and she was feeling better and better. In fact she was almost cheerful in spite of a damp spongy sensation near her eyes and temple—fatigue probably—and the sore edges around her mouth where duct tape had been ripped off again and again.
But she had won the first round. She had been kidnapped and she had gotten away. Her six hundred dollars was back in her purse and her purse was safely back over her own shoulder. And her mysterious persecutor was Scooter! Scooter, whose own mother once told him he was born to be an ex-husband.
Now it looked like she might solve her eviction problem too. At least she was on her way. Nicola offered to write Lou a check for half the amount now and the other half in a week, and Lou agreed. Then, as they waited to cross Beach Street, Nicola wrote down her landlord’s name and address and gave it to him.
Lou looked at the paper. “Twelve Bliss Street,” he read. “Where’s that?”
“I have no idea. Knowing Robert, it’s probably some seedy little alley near the highway.”
The light changed and they stepped out into the street where a few tourists were parking their cars or reading posted menus. Nicola looked at her watch.
“Why do you meet for breakfast if you can’t do business while you’re eating?” she asked Lou.
“Actually,” he said, “I usually do do business while I’m eating. I just, I didn’t want to this time.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” Lou hesitated. “For one thing I wanted to see the wharf,” he said.
She took a chance. “You were impressed when I guessed you were a restaurant critic,” she said.
“Food critic,” he corrected.
“A food critic. You were impressed. You wanted to see more of me.”
Lou smiled an easy kind of grin. “Who wouldn’t,” he said.
They walked by the restaurants, then turned down a smaller street with a line of motel signs: Wharf Motel, Piedmont Motel, Daily and Weekly Rates. As she passed one open doorway, a man standing in the vestibule wearing a silver bracelet reached out to close the door—Nicola’s attention was caught by the bracelet and she looked up in time to see the man’s face. It was Chorizo.
“That’s strange,” she said.
“What?” Lou asked.
“The man in there—we eat lunch sometimes at the same time in a café near my office. He told me he lived in Noe Valley.”
Lou stopped for a moment and looked back at the motel.
“Golden Gate Rooms,” he said. “Maybe he works there.”
“And eats lunch in West Portal? It’s way across town.”
“Did he see you, too?”
“I’m not sure,” Nicola said, looking at the closed door.
Nine
Chorizo locked the motel door after he closed it, yawned, then set the Vacancy sign to NO. He was tired from last night—he didn’t get done until almost four in the morning, and he still had some, what should he call it, some tidying up to do.
When he walked back to the small room he used as an office the accountant was still sitting in front of the computer, an accounting log on her lap and two more open on the desk. She played with a strand of her hair as she examined one of the books, turned a page, then positioned the book better under the desk lamp.
The room was dark. Although there were two square windows looking out into the yard—a small patch of sandy dirt with a few abandoned paint buckets and irregular fencing—the room was always dark. It was also crowded. Junk mail and phone books and accounting records were stacked on every conceivable surface, and a large ancient copier took up one corner. A fat gray and black cat lay on top of the copier and a litter box was positioned on the floor beside it. The room smelled of paper and pine-scented kitty litter. Chorizo picked up a small manicure case that was on his desk, the desk with the phone, and looked at the tiny steel instruments inside.
“Is your brother coming?” he asked.
“He said he would.”
He moved a log book and sat down on the only other chair in the office. Then he selected an emery board and began filing his thumbnail carefully, leveling the nail in one direction. The woman’s fingernails were terrible, bitten and split. She chewed on her thumbnail as she sat there.
“You’re very restless,” Chorizo said.
“I’ve been here all night,” she reminded him.
“You have until Friday,” Chorizo said. “I’m sure you can make everything clean and pretty by then.”
“They should have audited you years ago.”
She was young and pretty and wore small oval eyeglasses and had long dark hair and dark eyes. As she studied the book on her lap she crossed one leg over the other, then began jiggling her foot.
“Restlessness is a form of fear, you know,” Chorizo told her. He looked at his thumbnail, then began filing the nail of his index finger. “A fear of death. We play with our hair, we jiggle our knees, all in the vain attempt to prove we are still alive. We think that if we just keep moving we won’t die on the spot.”
The woman did not appear to be listening. “I’m putting all the receipts with no dates in this envelope,” she told him.
Chorizo selected a small rosewood stick from his manicure set and began to push back his cuticles.
“And yet fear is good,” he went on. “It’s the primary attribute of a warrior. Without fear, we cannot experience fearlessness. One feels afraid, one moves beyond it. I’m speaking of the spiritual warrior.”
He paused again, then took out a small blue bottle of cuticle complex and squeezed some onto his fingers. The woman looked from book to computer to book again, and in the silence noises from the outside could be heard—a shout, the screech of bus brakes. Chorizo rubbed lotion into his skin, then stopped as if to listen.
“I’m looking for nineteen ninety-eight,” the woman said.
Chorizo looked at his hands again. “The spiritual warrior is an optimist. He does not give up on anyone or anything.”
The woman swiveled in her chair and began looking through another pile.
“Even lost records,” he said.
His silver bracelet clinked on the desktop and he turned it around, pulling a few dark hairs away from the chain links, then looked at his cuticles again.
“Did you know men’s nails grow faster than women’s? But the increased surface area makes them more vulnerable to bumps and bangs, which can cause splitting. Some say you should never cut your nails on a boat; this brings bad luck. But if you cut your nails on a Sunday, you will bring someone else bad luck. I like that one. My mother told me that one.”
There was a knock on the door and Chorizo swung back in his desk chair and rolled over to the door to open it. A tall, heavyset man with dark hair and dark eyes walked in and went immediately over to the woman at the desk, who glanced up at him.
“What do you think?” Chorizo said.
The man looked at Chorizo’s outstretched hands. “About what?”
“My nail
s! I’m thinking of buffing, though the effect of that has not been proven. The trouble is there, do you see the bulges in the middle of my thumbnails? It’s a certain sign of an early death. However, on the other hand, you see these white spots? They bring good luck. Never go to a palm reader; hand reading is so uncertain.”
“Are you all right?” the man asked his sister. “Have you eaten anything?”
“Never mind her,” Chorizo said. “Let her work. Listen, I want you to do something for me.”
The man looked at Chorizo. “What?”
“I want you to find someone for me, a woman named Nicola something. I don’t know her last name, but she works somewhere on West Portal. She’s a dental hygienist,” he said.
Ten
It was hard to believe that after that whole weekend, after the kidnapping and the night tied to a chair and the breakfast meeting with a bookie, for Christ’s sake, which she never dreamed would be a scheduled item in her day, after all that today was still just a Monday—Monday—and the feeling of Monday doesn’t change no matter what comes before it. Nicola mentally divided the morning into its major segments: power walk, muni, coffee. The minor segments, like work, fit in without much thought and it was better that way.
On Mondays, Nicola found, it’s best not to think too much. It’s best to just get on with the schedule, just start it all up again. This she did well.
At the office she hung up her jacket and turned on work mode. The meeting with Fred was scheduled for eleven. At ten-thirty Nicola could hear Guy sneezing down the hall and she knew that any minute he would pop his head in and complain about dust, which was usually his prelude before unleashing his anxiety du jour and asking Nicola to step into his office.
The fact was this: she was second in command here and she hated it. Alia, the nominal boss, was too busy looking after her spiritual condition to do much, so Guy made the decisions and had Nicola carry them out. In Nicola’s favorite fantasy, Guy was forced to move to New York City and find work as a house cleaner. She liked to picture him wearing a mesh hairnet.
“Nicola, could I see you a minute?” Guy asked from the doorway. “Jesus, the air in this room could kill you.”
12 Bliss Street Page 8
