“What are you doing here, Laszlo?”
My heart delivers a single smacking thump, a big mule kick, just at the sight of her: Silvie, my Silvie, mine no more, hands on hips, ruddy and skeptical. My former wife is not as tall as me, but she’s damn tall. The average woman is five foot five and a half, and Silvie is six foot one, buxom and broad-chested, blonde-headed and red-cheeked. I want to gather her up, press her to my body, which is most of what I ever wanted to do for the last ten years: hold her and tell her about all the shit the world was doing to drive me crazy, and listen to her laugh and remind me how lucky I was to be alive in the first place—how lucky we all are to be alive, to be in the Golden State, the two of us especially because we get to serve it.
For ten years that was all I wanted, until we split up six months ago because I’m a moron.
“What do you want, Laz?”
“That’s how we’re going to start? We can’t start nice?”
“Laszlo. Come on. What is it?”
Mr. Willis scrutinizes this exchange from his small desk, his allegiance clear. I edge closer to Silvie, trying to screen Willis out of the conversation, and Silvie draws back, as if I’m a predator, a snake in the forest coming in to strike. Her instinctive withdrawal stabs me in the heart. Silvie in her gold earrings, with her masses of thick hair piled up and curled, always almost but not quite corralled, some of it always drifting down to tease her neck. She purses her lips and crosses her arms.
“The last time we talked you said we weren’t going to talk for a while.”
“I know. But it’s not a law. It’s not a bulwark. We’re not exiled from each other.”
“Stipulated.”
“Do you think we can talk in your office?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sil.”
“Is this a personal matter or a professional matter?”
“Professional, Silvie. Okay? I need your help with a case.” I hold up my hands, like a man surrendering, like a magician proving there’s nothing up his sleeve. “Okay?”
“All right,” says Silvie after an extended pause. “Come on back.”
“Are you quite sure?” Mr. Willis puts in, and I can tell Silvie isn’t sure. She’s too smart not to know that me saying I’m here on business is at best the top layer in a complicated multilayered truth. But there is no question that she blames herself for what’s become of us, and she knows that I, grudging child in my heart, I blame her also, and she feels she owes me and she feels she always will.
It’s what I’m counting on, big clever monster that I am.
“Five minutes,” says Silvie at last. “I’m not busy, but I don’t like seeing you. It makes me sad.”
“Okay,” I say, and follow her through the inner doors and down the hall. “Stipulated.”
Silvie gestures to the chair on the other side of her desk, takes her own seat. Her inner office is a lot more pleasant than the rest of the floor: minimalist and cream-colored, gently lit and full of small cactuses in tidy beige planters. It’s got the cool, understated aesthetic she tried to get going in our home in Mar Vista, an effort forever foiled by my total indifference to my surroundings. There is a small coffee table, with exactly one book on it: Past Is Prologue, of course, the novel of the founding of the Golden State. I kiss my forefinger and brush it across the cover of the book, while Silvie waits, not softening, her eyes watchful and withholding. Clearly determined to play the surface truth of the situation: two professionals settling in to discuss a professional matter.
“So what is it?” Silvie says warily. “It’s a case?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of case?”
I smile, lay my heavy arms down on the desk, and swallow the wild urge to confess that I set up the whole thing—I broke into a man’s house and burned two weeks of his days, I clambered up behind him on a roof and pushed him to his death, all to contrive a reason to be here now, sitting across from you, Silvie, with our arms almost touching on your desk.
Come on, Laszlo. Get it together. Take a fucking breath.
“I have two weeks of missing days that I need reconstructed.”
“Whose days?”
“A man named Mose Crane. A roofer. Construction guy. Recently deceased.”
Silvie twists her lips to one side, the kind of small unconscious gesture that I watched her make a thousand times, and which I now force myself to ignore. When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.
“Mose Crane. A bad guy?”
“No. Well, I don’t know what kind of guy he is yet. That’s why I need the days built.”
“And you said two weeks? Two weeks in aggregate?”
“No. A two-week period.”
“Empty bags or no bags?”
“No bags. Clean.”
“No kidding.” Silvie shakes her head at me and puckers her lips. Silvie, with her plain, cheerful face, is an expert at the art of smiling disapproval. “Rather an extensive project you’re dumping in my lap, wouldn’t you say?”
I shift in my chair. “Is it?”
“Question with a question is pretty weak, Mr. Ratesic,” she says. “Even for you.”
But Silvie is interested. Her curiosity adds an intensity to the light in her eyes. She is biting at her lower lip, leaning forward. This is part of what I was counting on, coming to her directly like this: that despite it all she’s intrigued—as curious as I am about how a day laborer, about how anyone, would come to have a precise two-week bite taken out of his Provisional
