“Help me?” I said. Jessica nudged me. “Of course you can help me. We'd like to see Miss Brussels.”
“Mrs. Brussels,” he hissed. The phrase offered a lot of opportunity for hissing.
“Well, sure,” I said, feeling larger than I was by about two feet. His widow's peak hit me at the nipples. “That's what I said. Mrs. Brussels.”
He gave me a bright, cockeyed little bird's stare. “You didn't, of course,” he said. “What you said was Miss. Have you got an appointment?”
“Yes,” Jessica said bravely.
“No,” I said.
“Darlings,” he said, “make up your minds. I always have a headache on Mondays. You could be a tumor or you could be an aspirin. Personally, of course, I'd rather you were an aspirin. For one thing, you can get a refund on aspirin.”
“No,” I said, taking the frank, honest approach. “We don't have an appointment.”
“Well,” he said, looking at a book in front of him, “of course you realize that Mondays are very busy.”
“You'll be Birdie,” I said, reading the nameplate on his desk. That's what it said, Birdie. Other than the nameplate and the appointment book, which was the size of the average aircraft carrier, the desk was nearly barren. At one end of it stood a computer terminal, swiveled so that the screen was turned away from us.
“I'll be Birdie when the headache fades,” he said. “Until then I'll just be miserable. What would your business be with Mrs. Brussels?”
“This little darling here,” I said. “We're looking for representation.”
“Are we,” he said. “You realize that the usual method is to make an appointment first.”
“You couldn't see her on the phone,” I said. “You might have said no. So we decided to take a chance. Make a dimple, darling,” I said to Jessica.
Jessica put one finger to her cheek and smirked terribly. “My name is Jewel,” she said in a passable imitation of a Chinese singsong girl.
“She sings and dances,” I said. “Acts, too. Acts up a storm.”
“Not here, please” Birdie said. “Save it for Mrs. B. If you'll just take a seat, I'll inquire as to the state of her calendar.”
“It's in California,” Jessica said.
“Quick-witted, too,” Birdie said acidly. “Just what Johnny Carson is looking for.” He pushed a button under his desk and the door behind him slid open. “It's so Flash Gordon, isn't it?” he said, leaving us. He couldn't have been more than five-four, and he waddled.
“Put you in your place, didn't he, Jewel?” Jewel collapsed resentfully onto a couch, and I took a closer look at Birdie's desk. It was empty of any personal touches except for a Lucite frame holding a color picture of a little Yorkshire terrier, a breed I've always despised. “Purse dogs,” a friend of mine calls them, “society ladies put them in their purses to bite anyone who tries to steal their wallet.” There was also a little plaster-of-paris paperweight with the impression of a tiny dog's paw pressed into it. Below the paw, it said in shaky pencil, “Woofers, June 1988.”
I swiveled the computer workscreen toward me. I was looking at some kind of data base, a single record, idaho, it said, and then the date, fingers: 2000 orders. Then there were a couple of names, followed by five-digit numbers. Last request, the screen said: fingers: 1200 orders, special orders: it said: page down. Lacking the nerve to push page down because I wasn't sure I could get back to the first record, I swiveled the screen back into its original position. “Fingers are a boom market in Idaho,” I said.
“They've got a lot to give the finger to in Idaho,” Jessica said from a maroon plush couch where she was staring in dismay at a copy of JackandJill magazine. ” ’PeeWee to Marry,’ ” she read aloud. “Who the hell is PeeWee?”
I ignored her. Most of the furniture in the waiting room was half-size, perfect for children. Toys glimmered in the corners like the refuse of an overenthusiastic Christmas. There were wooden ducks with pull-ropes for the newly mobile and, at the other end of the spectrum, electronic baseball games and computerized time-wasters that were StarWars ripoffs. Most of the books and magazines were profusely illustrated with pictures of squirrels and other sanctioned rodents wearing hairbows and bow ties.
“Well,” I said, folding myself into a chair so small that my knees hit my chin, “isn't this nice?”
“Simeon,” Jessica said, “you look like a paper clip.”
“Call me Dwight,” I said. “You Jewel, me Dwight, okay?”
“You ridiculous,” she said, giving up on JackandJill. “Can't you find someplace else to sit?”
“Jewel. Try to behave. This could be the place.”
She sat up, looking apprehensive. “Really? Why?”
The room didn't seem to be miked, and I couldn't see a hidden camera, but that didn't mean there wasn't one. Any- way, I wasn't sure I could explain why. I reached over affectionately and pinched her wrist, hard enough to get her attention. “For your career, Jewel,” I said, between my teeth, “this looks like the big time.”
“Bug time, you mean,” she said. I pinched her harder. “Yowk,” she said. “Okay, okay. If it looks good to you, Dwight, it looks good to me.”
We passed what seemed like a decade in silence, if you didn't count the electronic beeps of a StarWars game, which Jessica beat the bejesus out of in three consecutive passes. The phone blinked eight or nine times, but it was answered from inside. “They design these for cretins,” Jessica said, tossing the game aside.
“There's nothing wrong with Crete, honey,” Birdie said, coming back into the room. The door sighed closed behind him. “Very lovely, all mountains and ocean and fishermen.”
“Oceans and fishermen usually go together,” Jessica said sourly.
“Well,” Birdie said archly, seating himself, “there are fishermen and fishermen.”
“They all smell like fish,” Jessica said.
“What’re you, a lactovegetarian?” Birdie asked, exposing a nasty streak and half an inch of swollen gum.
“Will she see us?” I asked.
“A few minutes,” he said, pulling himself up to the computer and tapping a couple of keys. “She's on the phone now.” He looked over at the instrument on his desk. “She's on three phones,” he said proudly.
“She must have a lot of ears,” Jessica said.
“Witty child,” Birdie said, staring at the computer screen. “Perhaps you'll excuse me.”
With my face partially hidden by Jessica's discarded edition of JackandJill, I watched Birdie futzing around with the computer. What I saw was a middle-aged male secretary, a homosexual member of the lost generation, the last generation that was uncomfortable with the idea of coming out of the closet. I saw a prissy, probably obsessively neat little man who went through life feeling short-sheeted, a man who counted his change in supermarkets and felt grieved when it was right, a man who doubted the advertised beef content of wieners. Presented with a bill in a restaurant, he would have added it twice and then fudged on the tip. His party lost the election. His disposable razors wore out too soon. He never had enough money. Handed the daughter of the Pork King, he might have looked on her as a one-way airline ticket to Crete. The question was, who the hell was Mrs. Brussels?