“No,” Rachel said.
“It’s long as a novel.”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“So why ain’t it a novel?”
“It’s nonfiction.”
“Oh.”
The girl’s hair was leaf-brown and tied in two pigtails that lapped over her ears. She had braces on her teeth. She picked the book up again and flipped idly through the pages. There was silence.
Rachel Wallace said, “Are you thinking of buying a copy?”
The girl shook her head. “Naw,” she said, “I got no money anyway.”
“Then put the book down and go somewhere else,” Rachel said.
“Hey, I ain’t doing any harm,” the girl said.
Rachel looked at her.
“Oh, I’m through anyway,” the girl said and left the store.
“You got some smooth way with the reading public,” I said.
“Little twerp,” Rachel said. “Where do I get my ideas? Jesus Christ, where does she think I get them? Everyone asks me that. The question is inane.”
“She probably doesn’t know any better,” I said.
Rachel Wallace looked at me and said nothing. I didn’t have a sense that she thought me insightful.
Two young men came in. One was small and thin with a crew cut and gold-rimmed glasses. He had on a short yellow slicker with a hood up and blue serge pants with cuffs that stopped perhaps two inches above the tops of his wing-tipped cordovan shoes. He had rubbers on over the shoes. The other one was much bigger. He had the look of a fat weightlifter. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he was starting to get bald. He wore a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, a black down vest, and chino pants rolled up over laced work boots. The sleeves of his shirt were turned up.
The small one carried a white cardboard pastry box. I edged a little closer to Rachel when they came in. They didn’t look bookstorish. As they stopped in front of Rachel’s table I put my hand inside my jacket on the butt of my gun. As the small one opened the pastry box I moved. He came out with a chocolate cream pie and had it halfway into throwing position when I hit him with my shoulder. He got it off, side-armed and weakly, and it hit Rachel in the chest. I had the gun out now, and when the fat one grabbed at me I hit him on the wrist with the barrel. The small one bowled over backwards and fell on the floor.
I said, “Everybody freeze,” and pointed my gun at them. Always a snappy line.
The fat one was clutching his wrist against his stomach. “It was only a freaking pie, man,” he said.
The small one had scrunched up against the wall by the door. The wind was knocked out of him, and he was working on getting it back. I looked at Rachel. The pie had hit her on the left breast and slid down her dress to her lap, leaving a wide trail of chocolate and whipped cream.
I said to the men, “Roll over on the floor, face down. Clasp your hands back of your head.”
The little one did what I said. His breath was back. The fat one said, “Hey, man, I think you broke my freaking wrist.”
“On the floor,” I said.
He went down. I knelt behind them and searched them quickly with my left hand, keeping the gun clear in my right. They had no weapons.
The bookstore manager and Linda Smith were busy with paper towels trying to wipe the chocolate cream off Rachel; customers gathered in a kind of hushed circle—not frightened, embarrassed rather. I stood up.
Rachel’s face was flushed, and her eyes were bright. “Sweets for the sweet, my dear,” I said.
“Call the police,” she said.
“You want to prefer charges?” I said.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I want these two boars charged with assault.”
From the floor the fat one said, “Aw, lady, it was only a freaking pie.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Shut your foul, stupid mouth now. You grunting ass. I will do everything I can to put you in jail for this.”
I said, “Linda, could you call the buttons for us?”
She nodded and went over to the telephone behind the counter.
Rachel turned and looked at the five customers and two clerks in a small semicircle looking uncomfortable.
“What are you people looking at?” she said. “Go about your business. Go on. Move.”
They began to drift away. All five customers went out. The two clerks went back to arranging books on a display table downstairs.
“I think this autographing is over,” Rachel said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but the cops are coming. You gotta wait for them. They get grouchy as hell when you call them and screw.”
Linda Smith hung up the phone. “They’ll be right along,” she said.
And they were—a prowl car with two cops in uniform. They wanted to see my license and my gun permit, and they shook down both the assault suspects routinely and thoroughly. I didn’t bother to tell them I’d already done it; they’d have done it again anyway.
“You want to prefer assault charges against these two, lady?” one of the prowlies said.
“My name is Rachel Wallace. And I certainly do.”
“Okay, Rachel,” the cop said. There was a fine network of red veins in each cheek. “We’ll take them in. Sergeant’s gonna like this one, Jerry. Assault with a pie.”
They herded the two young men toward the door. The fat one said, “Geez, lady, it was just a freaking pie.”
Rachel leaned toward him a little and said to him very carefully, “Eat a shit sandwich.”
9
We drove back to the Ritz in silence. The traffic wasn’t heavy yet, and Linda Smith didn’t have to concentrate on driving as much as she did. As we went over the Mass. Ave. Bridge I looked at the way the rain dimpled the surface of the river. The sweep of the Charles from the bridge down toward the basin was very fine from the Mass. Ave. Bridge—much better when you walked across it, but okay from a car. The red-brick city on Beacon Hill, the original one, was prominent from here, capped by the gold dome of the Bulfinch State House. The high-rises of the modern city were all around it, but from here they didn’t dominate. It was like looking back through the rain to the way it was, and maybe should have been.
Linda Smith turned off Mass. Ave. and onto Commonwealth. “You don’t think I should have preferred* charges,” Rachel said to me.
“Not my business to think about that,” I said.
“But you disapprove.”
I shrugged. “Tends to clog up the court system.”
“Was I to let them walk away after insulting and degrading me?”
“I could have kicked each one in the fanny,” I said.
“That’s your solution to everything,” she said, and looked out the window.
“No, but it’s a solution to some things. You want them punished. What do you think will happen to them. A night in jail and a fifty dollar fine, maybe. To get that done will involve two prowl-car cops, a desk sergeant, a judge, a prosecutor, a public defender, and probably more. It will cost the state about two thousand dollars, and you’ll probably have to spend the morning in court and so will the two arresting officers. I could have made them sorry a lot sooner for free.”
She continued to stare out the window.
“And,” I said, “it was only a freaking pie, lady.”
She looked at me and almost smiled. “You were very quick,” she said.
“I didn’t know it was going to be a pie.”
“Would you have shot him?” she said. She wasn’t looking out the window now; she stared straight at me.
“If I had to. I almost did before I saw it was a pie.”
“What kind of a man would do that?”
“Throw a pie at someone?”
“No,” she said. “Shoot someone.”
“You asked me that before,” I said. “I don’t have a better answer this time except to say, Isn’t it good you’ve got one? At the rate we’re going, you’ll be attacked by a horde of chauvinist cameldrivers before the week is out.”
“You sound as if it were my fault. It is not. I do not cause trouble—I am beset by it because of my views.”