“Right,” she said, “I’m the youngest soph at UCLA.”
But suppose he really thought she was fifteen?
“Is that where you go to school?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Good school.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your major?”
“I want to be a social worker.”
“Hard work,” he said.
“Yes, but it’s what I want to do.”
“Good,” he said, but it sounded like a dismissal. Perhaps because he picked up the menu at the same time.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a doctor,” he said from behind the menu.
Stuck with it now. Go with the truth. Or at least the partial truth.
“Really?” she said. “Do you practice in L.A.?”
“I’m in residence there.”
True enough. But...
“I’m going back East to see my mother. She isn’t feeling well.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” he said, and lowered the menu. “I think I’ll have the eggs, too,” he said. “Is your home in New York?”
“Yes. Well, my mother’s. I’ll be staying with her for the summer.” She paused and then said, “They’re divorced. My dad’s with the Army in Germany. He’s a colonel.”
Sonny raised his brows appreciatively.
“I hardly ever see him anymore,” Elita said, somewhat wistfully.
“You must have done a lot of traveling around,” he said.
“Oh, yes. Well, an Army brat, you know. By the way, I’m not really fifteen.”
“You’re not?” he said, feigning surprise. “I thought you were. Your name’s Lolita, so I thought...”
“No, it’s Elita. E-L–I-T... you’re putting me on again, right?”
“How old are you really, Elita?”
“Nineteen. How old are you really?”
Please don’t say thirty, she thought.
“Twenty-nine,” he said.
She felt enormously relieved. Twenty-nine wasn’t quite thirty. But try to sell that to her mother. Mom? Hi, I just met this gorgeous guy on the train, I think I’m in love with him, he’s twenty-nine years old. Mom? Take your head out of the oven, Mom.
“What’s funny?” he asked, and she realized she was smiling.
“My mother,” she said.
“What about her?”
“Are you Mexican?” she asked.
“Why? Is your mother Mexican?”
“No, but are you?”
“Do I look Mexican?”
“Sort of.”
“My complexion?”
“I don’t know what. This... sort of exotic look you have.”
“Oh my,” he said, “exotic,” and waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
“Are you?”
“No, I’m part Indian and part British,” he said.
She wondered if that was better. Hello, Mom? He isn’t Mexican, you can climb down off the windowsill. He’s British, Mom. Well, part Indian, I guess.
“Indian Indian, right?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
Which is really a whole lot better than Comanche or Chippewa, Mom. Wait’ll you see him, he looks like a young Dr. Zhivago, whatever that actor’s name was. Only better looking.
“What part of India are you from?” she asked.
Careful, he thought.
“A little town called Jaisalmer,” he said.
“Where’s that?”
“Close to the Pakistan border. Have you ever been to India?”
“No. But my dad was stationed near there when I was twelve.”
“Oh? Where?”
“Burma,” she said.
He signaled to the waiter. Everything he did, his every motion, seemed smooth and accomplished. He made something as simple as signaling to the waiter seem like a liquid hand gesture in a ballet. Careful, she told herself, this can get complicated.
“Who’s Lolita?” she asked.
“A little girl who fell in with a dirty old man,” he said.
“Oh my,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
“Yes,” he said.
“And did she come to a sorry end?”
“Yes, sir,” the waiter said, “are you ready to place your order?”
“Elita?”
“I’ll have the eggs, over medium, please, with bacon.”
“Orange juice? Coffee?”
“A small orange juice. Do you have decaf?”
“Fresh brewed.”
“I’ll have a cup, please.”
“Sir?”
“Same as the lady,” Sonny said. “All the way down the line.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” the waiter said, and walked off grinning.
“Tell me more about Lolita,” she said.
The call from London came just as The Eagle was approaching Texas. The train had by then come through Arizona and almost all of New Mexico, and was on the outskirts of El Paso. On the train, it was still three-thirty in the afternoon, Mountain Time. In New York City, it was five-thirty on a hot summer evening.
When the telephone rang, Geoffrey was just about to hit the four-number combination that would unlock the inner door to what the consulate personnel called “the airlock.” The security measure had been installed in 1984, several weeks after Libyan terrorists killed a policewoman in London. The airlock consisted of a pair of steel doors flanking an empty cubicle. One door led to the inner offices. The other door led to the waiting room. Each door had a different combination lock on it. You opened one door, locked it behind you, and then opened the second door. The airlock had been designed to dissuade entry by anyone intending mischief. Geoffrey had already pressed the first number of the combination when Peggy Armstrong, one of the vice consuls in Passports and Visas, called in her high, shrill voice, “Geoff, for you! It’s the Mainland!”
He wondered whether hitting the first number of the combination and then leaving it at that would cause alarms to go off and security people to descend upon him in hordes. Nothing on the alarm panel indicated what one should do in order to abort. He waited, fully expecting total disaster. Nothing happened.
“Geoff!”
Peggy’s voice again.
“The Mainland!”
Why she insisted on calling Britain “the Mainland” was totally beyond him. He sometimes suspected that Peggy had descended from another planet and was only now coming to grips with living on earth. She did somewhat resemble an alien being, what with frizzed red hair sticking out all over her head, and enormous brown eyes magnified by equally enormous goggles. A totally bug-eyed, flat-chested wonder, standing beside his desk now in tweeds better suited to the moors than to the Three H’s of a summer in New York, telephone receiver in her hand, thoroughly exasperated look on her homely face.
“Thank you,” he said coolly, taking the phone and hoping his tone of voice conveyed the annoyance he’d felt at being yelled down like a fishmonger.
“Turner speaking,” he said as Peggy marched off in a huff, presumably to her waiting spaceship.
“Geoffrey, ho, it’s Miles Heatherton here.”
Heatherton worked in the Consular Department of London’s Foreign Office, in a street near St. James’s Park called Petty France. Geoffrey had telephoned him earlier today, immediately after the Twentieth Precinct biked over the passport they’d found in the murdered woman’s handbag. He’d given Heatherton the number on the passport, the woman’s full name — Gillian Holmes, as in Sherlock — and the date and place of issue, in this instance June of last year in London. All routine. As required, the woman had listed in her passport the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of two persons to be notified in the event of an emergency. One was a brother named Reginald Holmes, who lived in London. The other was a friend named Jocelyn Bradshaw, who lived thirty-six miles west of London, in Henley-on-Thames.