“Is that important?” I asked him.
“Let’s take a break for a while, Mr. Dibbuk,” Dr. Shriver said. “The dreams haven’t returned. Maybe you can come back when you feel safe enough to reveal yourself.”
“Back to therapy,” I said. “Why should I? I haven’t had one of those dreams in years. I’m fine. I’m happy.”
“Like hell you are. Anytime I ever come up on you when you’re alone, you have the saddest look on your face.”
The light changed to green but I turned to Mona instead of crossing. There was serious concern in her face for me. I wondered what it might be like to feel that way: pained at someone else’s grief, a grief that person didn’t even know.
“I’m fine,” I said, and we crossed together. “What’s the dinner for tonight?”
Sighing in defeat she said, “It’s the premiere issue of a new magazine I’m working for — Diablerie.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It depends,” Mona said. The strain in her voice lightened as she began to talk about her work. “The word can mean either mischievous or evil. The magazine is a blend of both — articles about sexy new stars, naughty getaways, and puff pieces about people in the news. Tonight they’re going to have Barbara Knowland as a guest at one of the tables. She may even address the audience.”
“Who’s Barbara Knowland?” I asked, happy not to be discussing my lapsed therapy.
“She was the woman who was held hostage by that guy who went on that killing rampage in Tennessee and Arkansas,” Mona said. “The one the police held for a year and a half because they thought that she was involved with the killings.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I remember. They finally found those videotapes of her tied up and that guy, whatshisname, came out of the coma...”
“Ron Tellman,” Mona said. “He testified that Card, the killer, kept the Knowland woman gagged and handcuffed to a steel bolt in the back of his covered pickup truck.”
“Damn. So now she’s written a memoir or something?”
“Scorched Earth: From Communes to Killers, by Barbara Knowland.”
We were at the hotel by then. We signed in at the reception table and got our name tags: MONA VALERIA and MONA VALERIa’s GUEST. I went to the table in the main hall while Mona made the rounds, chatting up &ends, potential clients, and competitors at the cocktail party held in the lobby.
There were forty-six round tables set up for the banquet. All the chairs were empty. Only the black-clad waitstaff was there, bustling around putting salads at place settings and making sure everything was perfect.
“Wine, sir?”
I looked up to see a very lovely young Asian woman carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and white in the other. She was quite fetching in her short black skirt and black stockings that let through the barest glimmer of pale skin.
I almost said yes. My incipient reply was so obvious that the question of which kind rose almost visibly in her throat.
“No,” I said. “I better not.”
“Why not? It’s a party, right?” Asian features with a New York soul.
“I took a drink one time when I was on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” I said. “The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a flophouse on the Bowery... five and a half years later.”
“That’s not good.”
I could have been friends with that woman. I was sure of it.
“You have Diet Coke?”
“Cola,” she said, annunciating the syllables.
“Okay. Cola,” I replied, mimicking her locution.
She smiled for me and went away. I decided that it was worth coming to the party after all. Those few words with that lovely child more than made up for the blowhards, backstabbers, and twits that inhabited Mona’s life.
I was watching the waitress walk across the large hall when a woman said, “Ben?”
There was a hand on my shoulder. She was forty-something, five foot two, natural brown hair with only a strand or two of gray. She wore a low-cut blue dress that seemed to be a size too small and had a shawl made from peacock feathers pinned to her left shoulder.
Her eyes were different colors, brown and green. For some reason this was very important to me. It meant something.
“Ben?”
“Yes?” I said, telling her with the tone of that single-syllable utterance that I didn’t know her.
“It’s me,” she said. “Star.”
“Um... I seem to have forgotten...”
“ ‘I seem to have forgotten’?” she said, as if those words shouldn’t have come from me. “Come on, Ben. You can’t forget me, us, that day... not something like that.”
She didn’t have a name tag identifying her field or magazine.
“What day was that?” I asked.
“Pretending won’t wash it away, Ben. We were both there.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Star.”
“June 28,1979,” she said, more an accusation than information.
“That’s back when I was still drinking,” I said. “I was just telling the waitress there that I’ve forgotten more nights than I remember from those days.”
“Forgotten? You don’t...?” Star’s face twisted into an expression that was either fear or distaste — maybe both. “Why would you come here if you don’t remember?”
“Listen, lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m here with my wife because she’s an editor for the magazine. That’s all. I don’t know you. I don’t remember you. Maybe we met a long time ago when I was drunk. If we did, I hope I was a gentleman. If I wasn’t, I hope you got over it.”
Suspicion overwhelmed any other emotion in Star’s reaction to me.
“Here’s your diet cola, sir,” the young Asian waitress said.
I was happy for the interruption.
“Thank you,” I said, and when I turned back, Star was gone.
“This is my husband, Benny Dibbuk,” Mona was saying.
The table was full now, as was the rest of the hall. My wife was introducing me to Harvard Rollins, some sort of fact-checker for the magazine.
“Ben,” I said, a little too forcefully, “Ben Dibbuk. So you’re an editor too, Mr. Rollins?”
“No. Not me. I wouldn’t know what to do with a comma to save my life.”
“We do more than add commas,” Mona said, putting her hand on the handsome white man’s forearm.
Everyone at the table seemed to think that this was a hilarious joke.
“So what do you do?” I asked as a kind of shelter against the laughter I couldn’t share in.
“Kinda like a detective. Sorta like that. When they get a story in that no one else has, they put me on the trail to make sure everything’s copacetic, if you know what I mean. Mostly it’s on the phone, and Internet stuff but I hit the bricks now and then.”
Harvard was lean and olive-skinned, in his midthirties. His eyes wanted to be brown but didn’t quite make it. His mustache had to have been waxed to stay so perfect.
“Wow. Is that common? Having a detective on staff?”
“I’m not a licensed P.I.,” he said, “just an ex-cop who doesn’t want the NYPD to send him into back-alley crack dens anymore.”
Mona loved it. One of the things that she’d always felt had been kept from her was excitement. The reason she was attracted to me in the first place was because I had hitchhiked around the country, been a hobo, a drunk, and a womanizer — that was until I got a job programming computers and started living like a regular guy.
“What about you, Ben?” Harvard asked me.
“Do you ever sit at your desk copying notes from a piece of paper onto a computer?” I asked him.