Daily Specials:
Meatloaf Dinner, all the trimmings $1.89
Chicken Pot Pie with salad $1.29
Hunter’s Stew with salad $1.49
And there it was scrawled along the bottom:
I must depart for England tomorrow. The burden is now yours. I have helped by hiding the key, the heart of the power that lurks in this trove. This task I completed today. There is little else I can do now. I fear they are coming. Keep it secret.
JRRT
“So what brings you here?” The barkeep had returned.
“Well, can I ask you a question first?”
“Shoot. First one’s free.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Me, on and off for fifteen years probably. What, you writing a book?”
“Close, but not exactly.”
Something dawned on her, looking at his left hand splayed across the bar wood. The missing piece of finger might be tied to the eye scar, like his hand had shot up to ward off whatever happened. Whatever had happened, he must have seen it coming.
Who would mess with this guy? She thought and then answered, someone with a big knife.
“The reason I asked, you came in here like you were looking for something besides a drink. Or company.”
“OK, I’m trying to find out something about this….” She slid the menu scrap in front of him. “It concerns a relative, my grandfather, the person who got the note at the bottom. Probably looked in his twenties then. Any ideas?”
He was clearly charmed by the vintage menu. It was a few moments before he answered. “We still do a Hunter’s Stew special, but otherwise this is way before my time.”
“The owner maybe?”
“Nope, they’re an investment group now, buying up distressed places around the upper West Side.”
“I hear this place was something of a landmark.”
“Still is. Lots of odd folks come in here — me excluded. Students, writers, tattoo artists, Nobel laureates, Columbia nerd-types, retirees, and invalids living in rent-controlled apartments who show up once a week. They order cocktails no one remembers — Sidecars, Old-Fashioneds, you know. They all come in and out. Gets to be a pattern from this side of the bar.”
“So what writers?”
He pointed. “Kerouac wrote On the Road right over there by the window. Jay McInerney supposedly wrote parts of Bright Lights, Big City in here. A bunch of music types hang out from time to time. Bono had lunch here with some save-the-world type. Harold Ramis and Bill Murray hung out when they filmed Ghostbusters up the street. Oh yeah, the guys who made up Sha-Na-Na. They were in the Woodstock movie. Definitely before your time.”
Cadence nodded, recalling greasy, juvenile delinquent rockers on stage. She pointed at the note again. “Well, I think the JRRT initials are Tolkien’s, you know, the Lord of the Rings writer.”
“Huh, sure, but never heard anyone say he’d been here.”
“But he has to have been, don’t you think, from the writing on the menu?”
“Yeah, yeah … Hey! You may be right. The bartender that retired from here, Vincent, once talked about how some famous English writer, I think it was Tolkien or Tidwell, was in here. The guy said the place reminded him of his pub back home. Had a regular thing there with a group of writers, I guess. The Inkspots, I think it was.”
“That’s a singing group. How about the Inklings?”
“Dunno. If you say so. I just remember the part about the pub. Which means he probably came in here several times. Vincent always kept track of the quasi-famous types who wandered in here.”
“So, any thoughts how to pick up a trail on this?”
“Colder than that well digger’s ass in Montana. Or a … oh well you get it. Let me think on it.” He drifted away, doing a turn at his job.
Cadence looked around, observing people moving here and there. There was something odd about the place, and the next moment she noticed a dark shadow in the corner that made her neck hairs stiffen.
A sliver of light from the swinging kitchen door played on and off the crumpled figure. He wore a ratty ski hat and old coat. His head was oriented like he was looking out at her. In truth, she realized, he looked to be a homeless person who had come in for coffee. The bartender brought him a glass of water and a cup of coffee, saying a few words. Cadence gazed out the window at a taxi pulled curbside, its hazard lights blinking madly in the rain.
“Ma’am?” She jerked, surprised that the bartender was suddenly back.
“Coats says he can help.”
“Who’s that?”
“You were just looking at him.”
She looked over there again. Same mysterious, neck-hair-raising gaze from a pool of shadow.
“So what’d he say?”
“For you to quit talking so loud and come over there.”
As she slowly got up from the bar stool, she was watched by another.
Since his release from Riker’s Island, Barren’s search for her had taken the remainder of the day and into the night, until this very moment.
Arriving outside a few minutes ago, he knew it was an inn from the mingled smells of alcohol, smoke, and the urine of human woe that swirled at the rain-sotted threshold. He pretty much understood the words inscribed above the door: WEST END BAR. He went in.
He had no need of weapons — not yet, as he was armed with passing command of their language and knowledge of their vanities. His hair was cut short except for the crude ruff striping front to back, like one of the guys in Rikers. He sat down at one end of the bar.
Just as a stag in Mirkwood will twist its ears and raise its antlered head above the oak brush to satisfy its curiosity at an interloper, so did these people twitch before the threat of his very presence.
The young black-haired woman at the end of the bar fidgeted and looked behind her anxiously. She was in all likelihood the one. She talked to a scarred innkeeper and then they both looked at a bearded figure hidden at a table in a dark corner. He was different, not one of the moon-faces, but no threat.
Barren bent his head slightly to eavesdrop on their discussion. Satisfied, he got up and went back out in the rain and entered a waiting taxi. It was time to learn to drive.
As Cadence approached the booth in the corner, the fragrant derelict reached out and literally yanked her into the seat beside him.
“Understand that you will be watched!”
Whether it was the words he whispered or the overwhelming stink that startled her, she kept her composure. She could see his face better now, even with the ski hat pulled down. He was a caricature of the Big Apple Homeless Man — unshaven, his face deeply fissured, hiding within layers of dank old coats — with barely enough money rattling in his pockets to get by, even if the city shelters were his home every night.
“I …”
“I know what you seek.” He quickly leaned to the side, peering at her from tabletop level. “Acoustics. Sitting here I can listen to every conversation in this room. That’s why this is my spot!”
She nodded in vague understanding, following his darting, conspiratorial eyes.
“Your grandfather I knew. Tolkien I knew. Not since those days of chaos and revolution have I spoken of this.”
“Yes?”
“Listen carefully, for if you have come here with this clue, you are no doubt in possession of a tale that will stretch and entangle with its root and branch. Beware of this: there are things evoked by lost stories, by words even, that have a life and a will of their own. Seek out a tale’s origin and you are likely to find another. Keep searching and you may stumble upon that realm where the word and the beast mingle as one.”