“I’d rather not say.” But a toothy grin to make it friendly.
“Was it Jack Ziegler?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
I ponder, watching Maxine sip her Perrier. “Did the person who gave you the money tell you what it was really for?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what was the money really for?”
“For your car.” Pointing toward the window. “If anything happened to it.”
Okay, I admit I was never a very good lawyer. Maybe that is why I became a law professor.
“You planned all along to hit my car?”
“Well, yeah. Probably. I mean, sure, I could have been more dainty about it.” She shrugs, a significant movement in a woman six feet tall, signaling me, perhaps, that there is nothing dainty about her at all. “I mean, you know what they say. Accidents can bring people together, right?” Tilting her head now to the other side and fluttering her eyelashes. Playacting, but not ineffectively.
“Sure, that’s the way I always meet people. Crash into their cars and take them to lunch.”
“Well, it worked.”
Okay, I am still a married man and the mystery is still too much, and we have done enough flirting. I lean across the table. “Maxine, that’s nuts and you know it. Now, I need to know what’s going on. I need to know who you are. I need to know what you are.”
“What I am?” Her eyes glitter. “What do you think I am?”
“You’re somebody who… who keeps turning up. It’s like you know where I’m going to be before I do.” I fork some salad into my mouth, chew a bit, swallow. “For instance, you were waiting for me at the skating rink.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you got there first. I’d be very interested to know how you knew I was going there.” A horrible thought occurs to me. “Did you bug my father’s house?”
Maxine’s response is leisurely. “Maybe I didn’t get to the rink first. Maybe I just got my skates on first.” She takes a small bite from a breadstick. “Think about it. How long were you at the rink before you saw me? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Plenty of time for me to follow you there, rent some skates, and lose myself in the crowd.”
“So you did follow me there.”
To my surprise, she gives what I take to be an honest answer. “Sure. You’re pretty easy to follow.”
This irritates me for some reason. But just briefly. “You should know. You followed me-my family and myself- to the Vineyard back in November. And you followed me in Washington.”
“Not very well.” She giggles, and this time the corners of my lips twitch. “I lost you at Dupont Circle. That was a neat trick, what you did with the taxi. If I can’t do any better than that, I’m not gonna have a job.”
An opening large enough for a truck. And intended, I have no doubt, for me to drive straight through.
“Exactly what is your job?”
All the fun goes out of Maxine’s expression, although her eyes are passionate and alert. “Persuading you,” she says.
“Persuading me of what?”
She pauses, and I can see that she has played the whole game to get to this precise point. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna find out what arrangements your father made. When you do, it’s my job to persuade you to give us what you find.”
“Who’s us?”
“We’re kinda like the good guys. I mean, not the great guys, we’re not saints or anything like that, but we’re better than some people you might give it to.”
“Yeah, but who are you?”
“Let’s just say… an interested party.”
“Interested party? Interested in what?”
She answers a slightly different question. “Whatever you do, don’t give it to your Uncle Jack. In his hands, it’s a weapon. It’s dangerous. In ours-it disappears, and everybody is happy.”
Maxine turns out to be right. The crab cakes are delicious, for the chef has managed to keep them flaky and light without leaving them with the fishy taste that is a sure sign of undercooking. The sauce is peppy but unintrusive. On the side are long serrated wedges of baked potato that fool the eye, but not the palate, into thinking they are fried. The waiter is helpful and present when needed without seeming to hover, and he evidently feels no need to share his name with us. It is, in short, a good place, of which the Vineyard has many, some, like this one, hidden away on side roads, far away from Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, known mainly to the well-to-do folks who own second homes up-Island but invisible to tourists and, just as important, to tourist guidebooks.
Maxine and I are talking, improbably, about our childhoods. The envelope full of cash has disappeared back into her bottomless bag, just like a conjuring trick. Maxine has declined, so far, to improve on her brief statement of her purpose in following me, parrying my every dialectical thrust with her hearty grin and contagious laughter. Yet, unlike my similarly hopeless effort to pry information out of the late Mr. Scott, this one rouses in me principally a sense of play; and possibly something more. I am having a far better time with this mysterious woman than a married man really should, particularly when you factor in the intelligence that she just ran into my car to get my attention, that she tried to bribe me, that she is carrying a gun in her shoulder bag, and that she was on the Island when my other pursuer, Colin Scott, went into the water.
“Even in high school, I was always taller than most of the guys,” she is saying, “so I never got many dates, because most guys don’t like taller girls.” Inviting a compliment that I elect not to bestow. So she talks on.
Maxine, it turns out, was a faculty brat, her parents both professors at old black colleges in the South. She refuses to specify which.
“So I was kind of happy to get an assignment that involved another academic.”
“I’m an assignment?”
“Well, you’re not an assignation, Misha.”
Using my nickname again. Then she startles me by asking how I got it. I startle myself by answering. I do not tell the story often, but I tell it now. I tell her how my parents, in their wisdom, named me Talcott, after my mother’s father. And how I changed it because of chess. My father taught me to play during some early Vineyard summer. He tried to teach all of us, insisting it would improve our minds, but the other children were less interested, perhaps because they were already in rebellion. Chess was one of the few things the Judge and I had in common when I was younger, and maybe when I was older, too; for we never seemed to agree on very much.
I do not remember my precise age at the time of my first lessons, but I do remember the event that led to my rechristening. I was playing chess with my big brother on the creaky porch of Vinerd Howse when my Uncle Derek, the big Communist whom my father more or less denied at his hearings, stumbled drunkenly from within, shading his rheumy eyes from the morning sunlight with his thick fingers, stained a tobacco yellow. The Judge used to lecture Derek for his weakness, not realizing that the same tendency to alcoholism, perhaps an inherited trait, would later snare him, too, at a moment of depression. For Derek, having soured by then on the possibility of a revolutionary movement among American workers, was terribly unhappy, as we could always detect in the worried glances of his wife, Thera. Now, swaying on his feet, my uncle looked down at the chessboard. Despite the difference in our ages, I was beating Addison soundly, for this was the only arena in which I usually bested him. Uncle Derek squinted at the two of us, puffed out his sallow cheeks, exhaling alcohol fumes strong enough to make us children dizzy, grinned unpleasantly, and mumbled, “So, I guess you’re Mikhail Tal now”-the Latvian wizard Mikhail Tal having been, for the briefest of historical moments, the chess champion of the world, and Uncle Derek having been, for nearly all of his life, an admirer of most things Soviet and, in consequence, an enduring embarrassment to my father. But Addison and I knew nothing of the larger chess world, and certainly had never heard of the great Tal. We looked at each other in confusion. We were always a little bit scared of Uncle Derek, and my father, who thought he was crazy, would have preferred to have no contact with him at all, but my mother, who believed in family, insisted. “No,” said my uncle, squinting against the glare. Our heads swung back in his direction.
