from you.”
After the ambulance drove away—much too slowly, as far as I was concerned—Letitia Vale, one of the Blend’s regulars, poked her head of wrapped gray braids inside the front door.
“Clare? Are you all right? What happened?”
Letitia was the third-chair viola player with the Metropolitan Symphony. A tea drinker. (Tea was not the Blend’s specialty, but we did have a standard selection. Earl Grey, jasmine, camomile—the teas one would expect.) Letitia said what she mostly enjoyed about the Blend was its atmosphere and its anisette biscotti.
When I had first managed the Blend almost ten years ago, Letitia had been a loyal customer. She’d even pulled together a little chamber ensemble to play at the Blend’s annual holiday parties.
“Oh, Letitia, Anabelle had an accident…” My voice choked to a stop.
“Heaven and earth! Is there anything I can do?” asked Letitia.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the cop named Demetrios told Letitia as he moved his body to block hers in yet another bob-and-weave game, “but we need to close the store now.”
“Oh! Oh, of course. Clare, I’ll come back later.” She waved reassuringly.
I nodded, no longer trusting my voice.
“Okay, ma’am,” said Langley, opening his notebook. “It’s Clare, right? Why don’t we start with your full name and address.”
I stared at him. Suddenly I had trouble focusing.
“Ma’am?” Langley prompted.
“What?” I asked.
He gazed into my face for a long moment.
“Okay, ma’am, I need you to take it easy, okay? I need you to take some deep breaths and sit down.” He motioned to the empty chair at one of the store’s twenty Italian marble-topped tables. “Can you tell us how you found the body—”
“Body?” My stomach turned, saliva filled my mouth. “I’m not…feeling so well.”
Demetrios shot Langley a look.
“Uh, sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean the body. I meant, uh, the girl.”
“Sit down, okay?” advised Demetrios. “You don’t look so good.”
I tried, but couldn’t. It only made me feel worse. All I could think of was what Grandma Cosi used to say to women who’d just suffered a loss or shocking news and came to her kitchen for a reading of coffee grounds.
“That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Let me make you some coffee.”
“What? No, ma’am, that’s not necessary—”
But I was already moving behind the counter, grabbing the tall, long-handled brass
The cops, mumbling between themselves, seemed unhappy with my activity, but it was helping me feel less numb and more normal. I’d prepared Greek-style coffee (aka Turkish coffee) many times. I’d learned how from my world-traveling ex-husband, who’d enjoyed the strong taste—even more powerful than espresso.
As I made the coffee, the cops stood at the counter and watched. After a minute or so, they began to ask me some questions.
(What time had I arrived this morning? Was the shop open or locked? How long had the girl worked for the store?)
As long as I kept busy making the coffee, I found I could answer pretty well.
(Close to nine. Locked. Six months, but I had known her only one.)
I’d explained how I’d just moved in above the store. How I’d managed the place ten years ago but had left to live and work in New Jersey.
They wanted to know why I’d decided to come back after so long.
“A lot of reasons,” I told them absently.
And over the next few minutes, as I continued to prepare the Greek coffee, I silently reminded myself of a few of them—starting with that early-morning phone call four weeks ago from Madame…
Three
“I’ve done away with Flaste,” Madame had announced that morning without preamble. “He’s an utter moron.”
The picture of a rotund, effeminate man finally came to mind. A surreal montage ensued: I saw Madame’s wrinkled hands pushing the fat man off the Village Blend’s four-story roof; her bejeweled fingers stirring arsenic into his morning latte; her determined knuckle clenching a revolver’s cold, metal trigger.
Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I rolled over. The phone’s death-black cord coiled across my starched white pillow. Blood-red digits glowed next to the bed. I made out a five, a zero, and a two.
5:02 a.m.
Half-opened miniblinds revealed the striated sky—a dark cobalt dome lightening to streaks of pale blue. Silver stars flickered a losing battle, their waning light a pallid display in the face of the brilliant noise just below the horizon.
I knew how those poor, pathetic stars felt. At thirty-nine and counting, I was forty years younger than Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois, yet I always felt comparatively little and weak in the presence of her burning energy.
Madame’s dawn phone call may have seemed odd, but ever since her husband had passed away six months before, her vigilance with the Blend had grown keener, almost obsessive. She’d begun ringing me about everything that had gone wrong or been mishandled—in the greatest of detail, and at the oddest hours.
“Do you know what that conniving boob did?” Madame asked. “
At last, a moment where I was expected to respond. “Uh. No,” I said.
“He had the gall to actually
I grimaced. A part of me felt sorry for the poor bastard who’d become the latest in a long string of hired—and fired—Blend managers. Lord, if Flaste had sold that plaque, he
From the day it opened in 1895, the Village Blend’s only signage has been that brass plaque, engraved with simple black lettering: FRESH ROASTED COFFEE SERVED DAILY. “And that is the way it
Situated on a quiet corner of Hudson Street, in the first two floors of a four-story red brick townhouse, the Blend had been sending her rich, earthy aroma of freshly brewed coffee into the winding lanes of Greenwich Village for over one hundred years. The historic streets surrounding the place had once felt the footsteps of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, e.e. cummings, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Albee, Jackson Pollack, and countless musicians, poets, painters, and politicians who’d influenced American and world culture.
Within a few blocks sat the Commerce Street home where Washington Irving wrote
In more recent years, film, theater, and television stars had patronized the Blend, along with novelists,
