Peril

it took him to drive away, then abruptly jangling with a harsh and deafening noise, not just Nicky’s insistent squealing, but all the clang and clatter of the world.

STARK

She took his hands and placed them in the tray.

“So, things good with you?”

Stark nodded.

Lucia was a brown swollen berry of a woman. Her hair was black but without shine, and her voice bore the cadences of the peasant island from which she’d come. But she had a ready smile, and she did a good job on his nails, and Stark found it refreshing to be touched by someone who wanted nothing from him but a generous tip.

“You got your health, that’s the main thing, no?” Lucia asked.

Stark remembered a line from Neruda, how on certain days the smell of aftershave made him sob. He knew well what the poet meant. On certain days something mournful hung in the air. Everything was draped in black crepe. He could not predict when such a day would come, nor ever fathom why it came. He knew only that on such occasions death seemed even sweeter than usual, and he felt an unmistakable longing to be rid of life’s unseemly detritus, the body’s crude humiliations, the idle patter of the streets, the heavy sense that nothing could be rescued from the stale water in which all things floated briefly and then sank. Each breath seemed empty, and he could find no reason to take it. It simply happened. He breathed. He didn’t will it, or want it. His lungs sucked in air, and this reflexive grasp for life struck him as no less absurd than Lucia’s mindless chatter, or the way her fat fingers massaged his own. It was all part of the same purely mechanistic design, without direction or purpose or will, desperate but not obviously so, the desperation built into the machine, its slimy oil. The hours were unbearable, and so you filled them with whatever you could in the same desperate way the lungs filled with air. That was the design, and Stark thought that one simple stern admonition must be tacked to the wall of every chromosome: Just get through it.

Lucia began to clean beneath the nails with a pointed wooden stick.

“You got pretty hands,” she said. “You got hands like a woman.”

Stark knew that this was not true. His hands, despite the creams and oils, were rough, his veins were raised and faintly blue. His fingers were stubby rather than tapered, and the pink nails were marked with milky-white specks. His father, the mill worker, had had rough, unattractive hands. So had his mother, the gray lady who washed the halls of the building they lived in, and in which she may well have entertained the squat little landlord on those months when she’d fallen behind in the rent.

“You want I should do the toes?” Lucia was blowing gently on his fingers now. “Some men, I do the toes.”

Stark shook his head, drew a twenty from the breast pocket of his jacket, and handed it to Lucia.

“Thank you,” she said happily. “I do good job, no?”

“Excellent, as always,” Stark told her.

On the street he tried to admire the day, the sunlight, the warm spring air. But it continued to bother him, this thing that had begun to trouble him as he sat in Washington Square and was now dragging his mood lower and lower. At the time he’d thought it had something to do with Marisol, but now he understood that it had to do with Mortimer, the new job he’d brought him, the woman he had to find for Mortimer’s friend.

Something was wrong.

And this something wrong began with the request itself, the fact that during all the long years of that association, Mortimer had never before asked a favor of him. Nor had he ever expressed the slightest hesitance in bringing him a new client. Now Mortimer had both asked for a favor and appeared unsure about the client he’d brought him. In Stark’s experience, such changes never boded well. With Lockridge, he’d noticed an unexpectedly snide look when he’d told him that he’d been unable to find Marisol. This response had signaled not only that Lockridge already knew that Marisol had been found, but that finding her had been only the first stage of a darker plot. Now he had the same uneasy feeling about Mortimer.

So just who was the phantom friend Mortimer claimed to have but would not identify?

And what did this “friend” intend to do when his missing wife was found?

There was something wrong with the whole thing, Stark decided, something left out or hidden. Mortimer wasn’t telling him the whole story, and in recognizing that austere fact, Stark felt a terrible sense that his old associate had crossed a fateful line. After all, Mortimer’s saving grace had always been that he clearly understood his own substantial limitations, the fact that in any test of wit or will he would surely come out the loser. For that reason Stark had never doubted that Mortimer would play straight with him, if for no other reason than to do otherwise would inevitably spell disaster. But now Stark suspected that Mortimer had taken a crooked road.

But why?

SARA

She was tired by the middle of the afternoon, but she knew she had to fight it. Years before, a talent agent had counseled Sara to be “perky.” A guy who owns a club is looking for a girl with spark, he’d said, even in a torch singer he’s looking for a spark. Sara had assumed that she would need to show the same spark now that she’d tried to show years before. Especially since the job she sought was one that required her to greet the public, answer the phone.

And so for the past hours, in the assorted jobs she’d sought since leaving the coffee shop, she’d tried to be bright-eyed, sharp . . . have a spark. She offered a quick smile and a ready hand. But it hadn’t worked, and as the minutes passed, she’d seen the interviewer slowly drift away, then rise, mutter a quick “Thanks for coming in,” and escort her to the door. Nor could she blame these people for not hiring her. She was in her late thirties, a woman with no experience, her resume a blank page. They had seen it in her eyes, seen through the sparkling mask that in some indefinable but alarming way she was at loose ends, would be trouble down the line. She knew that they couldn’t guess the force that drove her, but that didn’t matter. They wanted someone relaxed, someone easy, someone who believed that if you did everything right, things would work out, someone with experience but no past, a blank slate they could write their company’s logo on. They did not want a woman who answered their questions quickly and added nothing, a woman in whom they could hear the aching groan of a tightly wound spring.

She thought of the man who’d interviewed her for the job of receptionist in his hair salon, the way he’d looked at her hair, like it was a nest of squirming snakes, Thank you, we’ll be in touch. Then there was the woman at the attorney’s office, dressed like a man, who talked like a man, and whose flinty gaze said Now you’re sorry, right, for wasting your life, well, too late, sister.

The final job was located on Avenue C, a neighborhood Sara remembered well from her days in New York. Back then it had been a dangerous place, but now, as she moved down Sixth Street, she marveled at how much things had changed. There were young professionals on the street, along with the usual tradesmen and delivery people. Tompkins Square Park, once a mire of drug addicts, was now both park and playground, a well-tended expanse of green where children scurried in all directions while their well-heeled parents looked on.

Addison Film Works was located just off the park, the building a bit more dingy than the ones around it. There was no doorman, only a spare foyer with walls painted institutional gray and an ancient elevator that creaked and trembled as it rose to the fourth floor.

The door was at the end of a corridor stacked high with cardboard boxes and black towers of videotape. The name of the company was printed in block letters on frosted glass. A single name was written in the lower left corner of the glass: Art Gillman.

A stubby, overweight man in a dark double-breasted suit greeted Sara as she came through the door. “I’m Art Gillman,” he said. His hair was a lackluster brown, very thin on top, parted low on the left side and then swept over to cover spaces that would otherwise have been bald. “Sorry for the mess. I just got back from L.A.” He shrugged helplessly. “When I’m out of the office, things go to pot.”

Sara smiled weakly.

“So, what do you go by?” Gillman asked.

“Go by?” Sara asked.

“Name.”