She flicked her eyes across the room again. “Petra is safe here. No one will hurt her. She’s popular with my customers and with the staff. She has the kind of good-natured high spirits that make a server popular. Some of our customers may get overenthusiastic in their reaction to her, but she seems levelheaded. I’d be surprised to know she was blowing up something trivial into something major.”
“Me, too. That’s why I took her reaction seriously. Olympia, even if I’m not a good-natured, high-spirited kind of gal, you could do worse than trust me with your problems. If this guy Rodney is posing a threat-”
“Maybe being a detective makes you think you can pry into people’s affairs, whether they want it or not, but my club is my business, not yours.”
“Who is Rodney?” I asked. “Is he a cop?”
“Are you deaf? I told you to mind your own business.”
She turned on her heel. The club needed too much supervising on a packed night like tonight for her to waste more time arguing with me.
I didn’t see her stop to talk to Rodney, but she must have because he got up from his table and came over to me.
“Girlie, you put one foot wrong here, and I’ll personally stuff your body in a snowbank.”
“‘Girlie’? You sound like a bad movie script, Rodney.”
His lips curved into something like a sneer. “Maybe, but you could look like part of a bad movie yourself if you try to mess with me. Got it?”
I leaned against the railing and yawned. “Go put on a sheet and dance around a cross if you want to scare people. That how you got Olympia so rattled?”
He pulled his hand back as if he were going to hit me but thought better of it in the nick of time.
“No one messes with me, girlie. Not you, and not that smart-mouthed cousin of yours, either.”
“People who mess with me or my cousin tend to spend a lot of years in Stateville, Rodney, when they aren’t picking themselves out of gutters-or snowbanks. Ask around, anyone will tell you the same. Now, go back to your chair. The band is packing up, the Artist will be onstage soon, and the rest of the audience will be peevish if you block their view.”
His face scrunched together in ugly lines like a thwarted toddler’s. He flipped his coat open so I could see the outsize gun in his shoulder holster, but I pretended to be looking at the stage.
He finally hissed, “Just watch yourself, girlie,” and swaggered back to his seat a few seconds before the houselights went down.
I made a face in the dark. Maybe I hadn’t changed so much from those days of trailing around South Chicago with Boom-Boom, looking for fights.
The lights came back up, and the routine followed its usual course, with the Artist appearing magically on her stool. The audience reacted in their usual way, gasping with amazement at the intricacy of the work on the plasma screens, shifting nervously with sexual excitement at the more graphic imagery.
Rodney, at his central table, was staring moodily at his sixth bottle of beer. He didn’t seem to be in the mood to paint tonight. Nadia had appeared without my noticing, perhaps when the lights were down, or maybe when Rodney was threatening me. She was at a table near the front, twirling her hair around her fingers. She didn’t wait, as she had the first time I’d seen her, for the rest of the room to paint. I studied Chad while Nadia painted, but he seemed to have himself under control. Maybe he was getting used to her. Or maybe his friends had persuaded him to stay calm. He seemed to be more intent on Nadia’s drawings than on Nadia herself-he was watching the screens onstage where the webcams were broadcasting her work.
Again, she was creating her intricate design. I’d remembered them as pink hats, but they were pink-and-gray scrolls. When she finished covering the Artist’s back with them, she began drawing a woman’s face, a beautiful young woman with dark curly hair, and then she took a palette knife and slashed it.
I looked over at Chad. He was sweating, and his tattooed arms were shaking. His buddies were holding him, but he didn’t make any effort to get out of his chair.
As soon as Nadia had finished, she went back to her table and gathered her coat and backpack from the floor. She skirted the back of the stage and disappeared. Chad suddenly broke away from his friends and followed her.
Most of the club, including the waitstaff, was focused on the Artist, who was stretching and preening to make Nadia’s work as visible as possible. Those who saw Chad might have assumed he was heading for the men’s room, since the toilets were along a narrow corridor that also led backstage. I pushed my way through the crowd at the back as fast as I could.
A young man in a worn Army windbreaker hurried after me. He’d been with Chad at their table. His face, pitted and craggy despite his youth, was unmistakable. We got backstage just in time to see the alley door shut behind Chad.
“Man! Don’t be doing something stupid now.”
The guy seemed to be talking to himself more than me, but we sprinted together to the door.
So many cars filled the area that we couldn’t see Chad or Nadia at first, but we heard Chad shouting, “Why are you doing this? Who sent you here?” as we slipped and stumbled along the icy gravel of the parking lot toward his voice.
Chad, under one of the streetlamps, was standing over Nadia. He wasn’t touching her, but he was leaning down so his face was close to hers. He’d left his coat in the bar, and the lamp picked up the tattoos along his bare forearms. He was holding a black object, something that looked like an outsize oven mitt, under her face. Even in her bulky parka, Nadia looked frail next to him.
We reached them in time to hear Nadia say, “Who sent you? Are you spying on me?” while Chad was yelling, “Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is! Why are you doing this to me?”
Chad’s friend sprinted to his side and wrapped an arm across his neck, affection and restraint in one gesture. “You don’t want to be out here in the cold, man. Come on. Let’s go back inside, warm up, get another beer.”
I pulled Nadia away, leading her across the parking lot toward Lake Street. “Nadia, what’s going on here? Why is Chad so upset by your painting?”
“Who are you?” She blinked at me.
“My name’s V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator, and if there’s something-”
“A detective? Go to hell!” She wrenched free of my hand. “I’m sick and tired of people spying on me. Tell them that!”
“Tell who that? I’m not spying on you. I just want to know-”
“I’ve seen you in the club. I know what you’re doing there. No one is going to stop me from painting-”
“I don’t want to stop you. Please, Nadia, can we talk where it’s warmer? It’s brutal out here.”
“We can’t talk at all. If you come near me again, I’ll… I’ll spray pepper in your eyes.”
She broke away from me, stomped down Lake Street to the L stop. I watched as she climbed up to the platform, puzzled by the whole exchange. Chad’s and Nadia’s accusations of spy versus spy made them seem like a married couple in the middle of a bad divorce. But what was the black oblong Chad had held under her nose?
When I returned to the club, the Body Artist was finishing her act. No one had painted over Nadia’s work, but the Artist’s front and arms were covered with crude drawings, stripes, a tic-tac-toe board, and a few sunflowers.
“All of you are amazing, amazing artists. Feel good about who you are in the world, how creative you are, and come see your work on my website, at embodiedart.com. Remember, it’s a cold, cruel world out there, but art can keep you warm even if it can’t keep you safe.”
She held up her hands in a peace sign, and left the stage. Olympia kept the images running on the screens while she turned canned music back on, and the audience relaxed into explosions of laughter. The release of sexual tension made everyone order drinks, and my cousin and the rest of the waitstaff were running around madly for the next twenty minutes.
I’d had enough of everyone at Club Gouge, but I went back to the Body Artist’s dressing room thinking I should at least talk to her. Olympia’s bouncer was standing outside her door.
“Sorry, but she doesn’t want to be disturbed after her performance. It takes a long time for her to clean up, and she’s exhausted.”
“I know just how she feels.”
I smiled and ducked under his arm and was in the dressing room before he could grab me. He followed me as
