walking with one hand behind their backs. While he checked twenty-dollar specials on the blackboard Maggie told him she felt awkward about Termeer: 'I could have done better.'
When she saw he was having trouble understanding the menu she translated the names of some of the fancier spaghetti sauces. 'My ex-husband is an Italian cook. Our schedules were always wrong, we hardly ever saw each other. It's easy to drift apart in this town.'
Any kids?
No kids.
Was de Gier ever married?
No.
Any particular reason?
Because of the things, de Gier explained while they shared the antipasto. It wasn't just marriage, it was that marriage comes with the need to collect things, and the need to worry about losing things. Things weigh heavily. There is monthly interest. There is anxiety.
'You can't handle marriage?'
De Gier couldn't handle marriage.
Maggie looked up from her black olives. 'You don't want kids?'
'In Holland?' de Gier asked. 'What if they don't want to be stacked on top of each other? Where am I going to put them? In a hole in a dike? What if they don't want to stay stacked? I don't want to myself.'
'Where do you want to go?'
To Papua New Guinea, to the furthest place. She wouldn't know where that was.
'North of Australia,' Maggie said. 'My sister sails in that area, to Milne Bay out of Brisbane. Her husband owns a schooner. They take tourists for big dough. There are pirate cannibals there, Papuans in canoes, with razor-sharp paddles.'
That's where de Gier wanted to go.
'To have room for your kids?'
Just a dog maybe. De Gier hadn't owned a dog yet. He would like to try that.
'They eat dogs there,' Maggie said. 'It said so in Kathleen's last letter. The cannibals keep dogs for food. There is no refrigeration, so if the family wants meat for dinner Pa picks up a stick and chases Fido. But they don't eat their kids. You would get to keep them.'
He didn't want to keep them.
'But you look fine,' Maggie said. 'You look smart too. You might improve the gene pool.'
He muttered, as he raised his tumbler filled with the house wine, dry white California, 'Fok the gene pool.'
She laughed. 'You have a cute accent. It's okay. I don't want kids either. I thought I did but kids keep killing each other at school now. So are you an egotist? Incapable of sharing?'
De Gier said that he did like his cat, now being taken care of by friends.
'So you have friends? You socialize?'
De Gier looked horrified. 'You mean do I visit with people?'
'You don't do that?'
'To do what?'
'You're not gay?'
De Gier shook his head. 'I keep busy.'
'You're a ladies' man?' She smiled. 'You cruise the singles bars?' She smiled again. 'But you wouldn't have to, would you? You don't want them to fall in love with you, to jump at you from their high horses.'
Jesus, de Gier thought. Anybody up there. Please.
Maggie was shaking her head. 'There is old age, you know, and loneliness.'
He waved defensively. 'I know. We are programmed to be gregarious.'
'You know why I became a mountie?' Maggie asked. 'To stay away from what is happening now. To look down on things. I was a street cop first. I did everything-cars, a motorcycle even-and I always managed to find old people in their little apartments, always alone, always dying or dead or just disgusting. The linoleum is always cracked and sometimes the walls move because of the roaches crawling on roaches and there are the smells, rusted-through refrigerators filled with yechch'-she gestured-'rats rattling in useless dishwashers…'
He knew. It was the same in Amsterdam but there they're short on dishwashers. Not on rats. He had seen rats jump to get at the dead canary in the cage.
All the gruesome details.
De Gier's sensitive large brown eyes looked into Maggie's sensitive slanting green eyes.
'So?' Maggie asked.
He grinned. 'So what. There's always death at the end. Death never seems to be pleasant. Birth isn't fun either, but there is the quest in between.'
He became flirtatious for a moment. 'There is the beautiful company.'
Maggie said thank you. 'You look okay too. Is that mustache real?'
He brought up Termeer again over mochacinos topped with whipped cream.
'I thought I was done with rinding dead old people, that Jagger would lift me out of the misery. He's a nice tall horse.' Maggie smiled. He noticed her lips, the sort of lips that could advertise lipstick. 'Jagger didn't help at all. On the contrary. Jagger almost hurt Fritz. Jagger, being such a large horse, is usually calm but Fritz was standing still again, looking like Mercury…'
'Mercury?' de Gier asked.
She nodded. 'The Roman god. The messenger pose. There's a statue of Mercury on top of one of the buildings way downtown, I don't remember where. A nude guy with one leg up, one arm forward, one arm backward, head raised, winged hat?'
De Gier had slipped into his sympathetic questioning mode. 'Yes, the pose must be tiring.'
'Your old codger was able to hold it pretty well.' Maggie grimaced. 'Fritz had Jagger fooled. I think animals have trouble seeing objects that don't move. So suddenly Fritz started running about like some hyped-up toddler. You can't really blame Jagger. Why did Fritz have to spoil such a nice Sunday? We were all having fun.' She stared through de Gier, transported back to Central Park that sunny morning. She told him about the wonderful balloon structure, the huge dinosaur, moving every which way in the breeze, making all the kids scream when the big head dipped toward them, and there were the Park Stompers with their Dixieland tunes and old blues, and the movie- character look-alikes on their way to the contest, and suddenly there is horror. Up pops Fritz.
De Gier looked sympathetic.
'Jagger's hoof just grazed him,' Maggie said. 'I dismounted to check whether he was okay. He kept saying he was fine, not to bother.'
Maggie frowned. 'I apologized, I even offered to get an ambulance. That's a big no-no, you know, a police horse damaging a civilian. I was prepared to call the precinct on my radio, get someone higher up to check out the scene.' She shook her head again. 'But Fritz said he was fine.'
'No nausea, no shock, nothing?'
Maggie's ponytail swung both ways. 'He said he was just fine.'
'Then what happened?'
Maggie remembered an old tourist couple, with the same accent as de Gier's, harassing her. She had ridden off but the couple called her back. Fritz was sitting on a bench by that time. He looked a bit tired. She didn't feel like talking to him again and had ordered the couple 'on their way.'
'That's where I went wrong,' Maggie said. 'Fritz wasn't okay.' Maggie's ponytail bobbed about again. 'The investigation at the precinct exonerated me, but I don't feel good about not going back.'
De Gier asked about the seeing-eye dog called Kali.
Maggie thought she had seen the dog that Sunday, possibly with a man called Charlie. An older man, muscular, who worked out in the playgrounds. 'He drags one leg, but not too badly. He should use a cane.'
Maggie didn't know whether Fritz and Charlie knew each other.
She might have seen the dog with Fritz, she couldn't remember. Kali often roamed around by herself, which was prohibited. Dogs were supposed to be on a leash. She had talked to Charlie about that but you know what they're like. 'Yes, ma'am…fuck you, ma'am.'
