Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  I could see a shadow in the hallway. It was Ed, pacing toward the room real slow. With one swift move he held his gun against the Russian’s temple.

  “Drop that piece now or your foreign brains will be all over my dog, and I really, really don’t want to bathe my dog tonight.”

  And he don’t want no bathing either, I thought.

  The Russian dropped his weapon. Doc Lacey went straight to Tom and Livvy, pulling tape from their mouths. But before they could speak, Ed’s partner came into the room.

  “Whoa there, this is really so freaking weird. We got a mailman at the front door having a smoke while what looks like Big Foot is pinning down a Russian guy with a cone on his head. And we got dogs sitting on Russians all over the place, and now you got dogs in here. Oh, and don’t tell me—she’s a veterinarian!”

  “You got that right, Sherlock,” said Ed. “Let’s get everyone down to the precinct and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  * * *

  —

  And here’s the bottom of it. Turns out Tom and Livvy had developed an app to make it easier to process and ship stuff throughout the U.S. of A. and overseas. Kinda like Uber for packages. Not sure of the finer points and how it all works, but anyone can sign up to take packages if they’re going to another place—gives them some pocket money when they get there. Sure, there’s companies doing the same thing, but this is different. Bigger. And it could seriously dent the coffers of your FedEx and your UPS, to say nothing of putting Bill out of a job. Suddenly, anyone could be a part-time delivery person, and without having to wear brown shorts.

  They had documentation and security issues resolved, and serious interest from all the big online outlets. We’re talking Amazon, Walmart—and they’d landed what they call “first round funding” from one of those venture capitalists. It was, as Ed said, a slam-dunk straight into the billionaires’ club, brunching with Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett. Who knew? Trouble is the Russian Mafya knew—and don’t correct me. It’s not Mafia, because they’re not Italian.

  Anyway, they figured it would be easier to ship contraband—there’s an old word for you—across the seven seas. And the Russians not only wanted in, they wanted it all, and in a very big way. So they decided to nab Tom and Livvy and get their hands on everything they knew, or would know in time, holding them hostage until they were no longer useful—and we don’t want to even think about what they’d do when they were done. But what the Russians got right was knowledge of the human-dog bond. “As soon as they took us away from Dude,” said Tom, “I told them we’d do anything to get home. No decent person leaves their dog.”

  “Even if that dog chews brand new trail runners,” cooed Livvy, her arms around the Dude.

  It was enough to make a dog roll in something bad.

  * * *

  —

  So, it’s been kinda quiet ever since Tom and Livvy came home, except for the celebrations. There was a big old street party, with dog treats from that cool place in the Embarcadero Center. Dr. Lacey and Bill received medals, and so did every dog in the Alliance—nice ceremony at the SFPD. Ed got a promotion.

  That night, I settled down in our living room and looked out the window. I was reading Suspect by Robert Crais for the hundredth time—jeez, I love his Maggie, the German Shepherd who never left her partner when he was down. I’d given Angus The Call of the Wild, and told him Jack London was turned away by a lot of publishers after he’d written that book, and then it became a bestseller. Humans love a dog story.

  As the moon lit up our street, I could hear the strains of “Hard Day’s Night” coming from Penny’s house. I saw Maya’s person take her for the last-thing-at-night amble. They stopped and chatted with Ella and Wrigs and their people. Wrigs absconded into Penny’s yard, so Maya and Ella brought him back. We all know Hank’s sleeping by the refrigerator. Samba went home happy because he passed his review, and Ladybird was in the shadows, slinking toward the coyote grove for a midnight yipping. And Wagatha Labsy was at her window, keeping watch. She looked across and our eyes met. We raised noses.

  All was well in the ’hood. For tonight, anyway.

  Glock, Paper, Scissors

  SHELLEY COSTA

  New York City

  Here is what I will remember from the moment I shot him:

  A bloated half-moon in the cold dawn. The hydraulic wheeze of the garbage truck up the block. A short recoil. A whooping siren that—so soon—had nothing to do with me. The sound of the gunshot peeled a few layers off my old skin, and I was grateful I came to this moment already half deaf. No new loss. Not for me.

  He, on the other hand, lurched from the 9mm round and went down inelegantly.

  I got close enough that a single shot was all I needed. If I failed with one round, I wasn’t doing my job, and my job was stepping up close to this killer. I wanted to be close enough for no mistakes. Close enough for him to know me. He died there on the street. As I had always hoped he would, only many lifetimes too late. Mine. His. And, most of all, hers. Before I turned away from the mess he had always been—now he was just a mess in an Armani coat—I caught a glimpse of his strange marble eyes where death had cut off his stunned recognition of me.

  Never had I felt more like my twelve-year-old self, and my heart leaped. I had missed this twelve-year-old girl. I slowly tucked my gun hand back into the soft folds of my long coat. From the other pocket I pulled the carefully folded paper I had opened only twice since that terrible afternoon in July of 1942.

  My fingers teased the folds open. I gasped, “Ah,” in the carriage lights flanking the entranceway, and I bent over the mess. Finally, I had found a use for him. I smoothed out the priceless paper on the dead shoulder. There it was. There it was, for what would be the last time, and I was content.

  The piece of special white silhouette paper she always used for her paper cutting was softer to the touch than ever, and lightly tinged with seventy years of gentle decay. So was I. My skin was paper, my bones were paper, my mind was paper. All this paper life made me light once again, weightless as the homeless twelve-year-old girl I had been when the world blew apart and I went on the run.

  Paris, July 1942

  There were the careful snips she had made with her scissors hand, the twirling manipulations of the paper with her other hand, the robust swell of Caruso singing “Nessun Dorma” on the phonograph as we sat with our china cups of Darjeeling tea, stirring in ginger drops for extra flavor. The final image of what I knew would be an exquisite papercut was obscured until the very end, tiny clippings falling like everlasting snowflakes around her, the fairy tale princess.

  “Do Jews have fairy tales?” I asked shyly while she worked, just three nights before the end none of us could see.

  The paper twirled, the embroidery scissors snipped. “We have fools and monsters,” she said finally.

  “So do we.”

  “We learn from ours.”

  What she held up, then, was very nearly done, twin silhouettes of us both, back to back like equals, our heads sharing the centerfold. In the cutaway spaces of her half-page were her large dreamy eyes and full and slightly parted lips, always at the edge of a kind word. She had expertly cut out the look of my smaller face, my narrow, suspicious eyes, what she called my Gallic lips, closed tight for fear of letting something slip.

  A survival skill.

  And not the only one.

  At twelve, I had short brown curls. At seventeen, she had long blond waves. We admitted we preferred each other’s hair. Then, with a practiced hand, she eyed me and folded my half of the papercut over hers. The cutaway places overlapped. Together, the silhouettes made a single, new person, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “We can be partners!” I cried. The idea was so brilliant that the flat she shared with her father, the diamond merchant, brightened.

  She sat b
ack. “Partners?”

  I spun it grandly for her: “You can snip and I can sell. Up in Montmartre!” My fingers itched. “The tourists are crying to be separated from their francs,” I blurted.

  She gave me a keen look—those dark eyes slipped to the tear in my pullover that I had pinned—and I sank into a chair, afraid my Gallic lips had let too much slip, after all.

  Finally she laughed. “You make it sound like a crime.”

  “No,” I said, raising my chin, “not a crime”—no more crimes—“business partners.” We stared in silence at the double silhouette.

  “Together,” she remarked, tipping her head this way and that as she studied her handiwork, “we are less dreamy and, I think, more wise. D’accord,” she announced, giving her tea a vigorous stir, “partners it is.”

  I cried and hurled myself at her, hugging her tight. If I didn’t get it right, since only wind and fear ever held the likes of me, I would never know.

  New York City

  And in the light snow that was falling now, nearly a lifetime later, I saw tiny flakes land on the eyes that couldn’t blink them away. I studied him. Money, I decided, is no proof against the sleek purpose of the Glock pistol I had bought off a street kid in the Bronx thirty years ago. This pistol, this gray polymer lightweight wonder, was an eternal truth. Like fools and monsters.

  I lifted the dead arm, slipped the papercut double silhouette from Paris underneath, and let the arm fall. It was a great chance I took, leaving the papercut like a receipt for a long overdue service, but now, in my eighties, there were so few real chances left to take.

  Not like lightening my hair later that long-ago day in Paris with peroxide stolen from a chemist’s shop in Rue de Rivoli. Not like stuffing my thin, stained chemise with blue powder puffs stolen from a flat where I knew the Jews had been cleared out weeks ago. Not like sticking doorstop wedges in my shoes for extra height before heading for the Gare de Lyon and a night train to Rome. Now, all these years later, I might stand an inch too close to the edge of the subway platform on my way home from this shooting. I might just toss my cane into the Department of Sanitation truck as I passed. I might even add the Glock.

  At least, if I didn’t get very far, I would have a story to tell.

  And it would begin, “My name is Simone Halévy.”

  And so was hers.

  Paris, July 1942

  “Take whatever you like, Lisette,” she tells me with a smile that fades, “whatever you can use.” Then she adds with a choked laugh, “Whatever you can make off with.”

  Standing in the arched doorway of her bedroom, I murmur thanks. I hardly know what’s happening. I only know that in the parlor, she and her gentle father stand hunched over the table and exchange strangled half-sentences. He hears a roundup, clearing the Marais. She hears the velodrome, but only temporarily. He is dressed in the neat black day coat he wears when he goes out to business in the first arrondissement—although, these days, he hardly dares. His graying hair under the skullcap is uncombed, and his fingers fidget over the diamonds.

  She pushes personal papers into a neat little stack and her voice is tight when she asks him how they are getting away. Just yesterday a rock broke the front windows, and the two of them knew better than to take the time to clean it up. I am slim and faster than a breeze and used to shadows. I sleep in confessionals and pee in the parks. My ghost fingers pull my livelihood straight from the pockets and purses of others.

  From time to time, my brother, Rémy, meets me in our favorite sewer a block from the cathedral. We compare, we tell stories, no longer knowing what’s true and what’s not, and we yearn for the big score. I whisper about my new friend in the flat with many grand rooms who lets me wash up in their clawfoot tub. I whisper about her father’s kind eyes and the red velvet pouch filled with white fire.

  “We are going to be partners,” I tell him in a casual boast.

  “Partners?” he snorts. “She’s a Jew and you are”—he sneered—“street trash.”

  Hearing his scorn all over again, I stiffen and turn back to the chifforobe in her bedroom. My fingers move through the padded hangers of silk and brocade, lightly fingering the beautiful, fine clothes as though I were turning the pages of a priceless book. I count ten pairs of shoes and half a dozen hats. In a satin-lined drawer is a thin jewelry case with her initials, SMH, embossed in gold in the lower right corner. How can I choose? How can I carry? And—most important of all—where do I bring these gifts? I have no chifforobe. I have no bedroom, no flat, no family beyond the sly Rémy.

  On the nightstand is what she has told me is a prayer book in lettering that looks like dancing figures. The book is encased in an engraved silver cover, with colorful gems inset. My hands shake just to hold a book so valued that it is decorated with garnets and amethysts. Next to the prayer book is a table cigarette lighter made out of porcelain with a design of pink flowers on a curling vine. I shake it. Empty. I am attempting to twist it open, not to refill it, but because I feel my mind shrinking into disappearance at the thought that they are leaving, my friend and her father. No, they are more than leaving. They are fleeing. That much is clear. And all I can do is help myself to mementoes. And steal a safety pin to repair my pullover, its hole from the yellow star on the breast of a Jew up the block, dead from age and exposure.

  I am even poorer than I had thought.

  Suddenly there are heavy boots on the steps in the hall. In one moment of terrible paralysis, we three look at one another a room apart. “Trop tard,” she cries, and again, “trop tard”—too late—turning, frightened, into her father’s arms. My cunning tells me it’s one soldier only, one pair of heavy boots, my ears know the difference—but how can that be? Usually they arrive in pairs, or gangs.

  I am fog, slipping silently into the chifforobe, leaving the door open a sliver no bigger than the finest of cuts she makes with her sharp little scissors with the tortoiseshell handle. Barely breathing, I position myself so I can see the parlor. At first I hear no pounding, just the door wrenching open, softly thudding against the wall. I hear no barked commands, no terrible slurs, but she and her father stand, amazed. With a flicker of his eyes toward the table, her father moves slightly to cover the view of the red plush velvet and white fire behind him.

  It’s the gun I see first, jerking the father and daughter back, back. And it’s not a Walther, the Nazi service pistol. Something smaller—

  And when the gunman moves into sight, I clap a hand over my mouth, terrified. The sheaf of yellow hair badly cut, the scar on his neck from the knife fight over turf, the slight limp from his tough birth, when nature had second thoughts. My brother. Two gunshots—fft, fft—and they go down in blood and silence. As she falls, she half whirls—my teeth sink hard into my hand—and a flung arm scatters the diamonds that were meant to set them up in a new life.

  Rémy steps over the bodies, one hand plucking diamonds off the table, dropping them into the red velvet pouch. This he stuffs, with the tender pats of a proprietor, into a breast pocket. With the anxious clearing of his throat, in case he has something to explain to anyone he meets on his way out—a quirk I know well—he is gone.

  I weep in the sad, fragrant darkness of her beautiful things. I have wet myself. I have bitten my hand bloody. Take whatever you like, Lisette, she had said. Whatever you can use. Am I fog? Will I slip away and live for all my days in corners underground?

  I step out of her chifforobe with a small leather valise in my hands. My fingers are quick, my bloody hand nearly dry. One dress, one pair of shoes, one hat. Into the valise they go. Along with the prayer book and the empty cigarette lighter. In the parlor, I gather up the personal papers—which include railway tickets, passports, identity cards—into a folder, and last of all I slide in the precious papercut of our double silhouette.

  With her embroidery scissors, I crouch, trembling, and snip a lock of her h
air, which I wrap in a handkerchief. I drop the scissors into the valise. Fingers as soft as fog gently close her eyelids. And then her father’s. As I stretch to reach him, something glints in the useless, useless light—there, next to the foot of the table. It is a diamond. A diamond the killer has missed.

  Whatever you can use. With the back of my wounded hand, first I touch her cooling cheek, and then I set it against her chest, where the bloodstain with none of the finery of cut paper has spread.

  Anger begins.

  So does a plan.

  I open the porcelain cigarette lighter with the pink flowers…and drop the diamond inside.

  New York City

  It was just three weeks ago that he slammed into me on West 47th Street as he emerged from a diamond merchant’s shop. More than seventy years after the murders. Hatless, he had a sheaf of well-cut white hair, and as he scowled at me, too fast for any recognition, Rémy adjusted a Burberry scarf, and there it was. A knife scar. With a gasp in the cold air, I ducked into the wind, my hood hanging low over my head. Pretending to gaze at the merchandise on Lucite tiers in a window decorated with cotton ball snowdrifts, I caught sight of him, at ninety, having a rear door to a tawny Rolls held open for him by an impassive uniformed driver. Brushing his lapels free of the contact with the clumsy old woman outside the diamond merchant’s shop, he folded himself inside.

  As the Rolls pulled away, I hailed a cab, and spent the next three weeks following the creature. I learned his habits. I made slow and thoughtful notes on his ways. Each night I returned to my apartment off Delancey Street, where I had lived for more than seventy years. There I had learned to read the beautiful dancing figures in the prayer book with the gem-studded cover. There I had lighted Shabbat candles for a lifetime with a gentle husband who, until he died, made sonorous blessings over the wine. There I had embroidered challah covers for three children as they married, using a pair of scissors with a tortoiseshell handle to snip the colorful threads. There I made a practice of what we Jews call tikkun olam—repair the world. I have taken up scherenschnitte, the art of paper cutting, which I teach at the community center.