The building pulsated to the beat of some old heavy-metal song, a raspy voice begging someone to pour some sugar on him. I approached the bouncer at the door, a thirty-something beast with a pleated and puckered face, dressed impeccably in a navy suit that might have been sewn from the fabric of three of Brooks Brothers’ finest.
He sized me up the way an auctioneer might have done in centuries past and flashed me a smile boasting four gold teeth. I was already fired up for my encounter with Marko, and I wasn’t going to swallow any insults from some misogynistic thug. I sharpened my tongue.
“Are you here for a job application, ma’am?” he said.
I hesitated, uncertain if I’d heard him correctly. His eyebrows remained raised, his expression earnest. He wasn’t patronizing me, I realized. He was being serious. Sometimes I had to remind myself I’d lost all that weight and wasn’t entirely hard on the eyes.
“And what if I am?” I said.
“The boss does interviews in the afternoon on account of it gets busy at night. You want to leave your name and come back tomorrow?” There wasn’t a hint of facetiousness about him.
I knew there’d come a moment when I’d be rewarded for staying out of the Two Little Red Hens Bakery on the Upper East Side, and curbing my addiction to their Brooklyn blackout cupcakes. And here it was, at a time when I least expected it. In fact, I was so happy, I wished I had one of their cupcakes in my car so I could celebrate.
“If you read minds by any chance,” I said, “please forgive me.”
He looked confused. “Excuse me?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “No matter what you may have heard me think, the truth is you’re a kind man with impeccable taste. I’m going to have a look inside, okay? My name is Nadia. My brother, Marko, he owns the joint.”
I blew past him and walked inside.
The place smelled of coconut, not disinfectant as before. The refugee from Woodstock had been replaced by six nubile young beauties. Two of them actually looked Brazilian, with bronzed bubble butts so big you could have gotten loans to build condos on them in the days of zero percent financing. The seedy stragglers had been replaced by one hundred or more men, from newbies to geriatrics, some with dirt on their Wranglers, others with pinstripes on their Armani suits.
I found Marko with his back to me behind the bar mashing lime and sugar in a muddler beside a long bottle of Brazilian cachaca. Four suits were laughing at the counter opposite him. I spied a grin on his face and deduced he’d just told them a joke. If there was one thing I was certain my brother knew how to do, it was empty a man’s pockets.
When he turned around and saw me, he froze. Shock and anger spread across his face. Without saying a word, he had told me that I was the last person on Earth he expected or wanted to see. He quickly served the caipirinhas, made his way around the bar and motioned for me to follow him to his office. He didn’t do so with a casual and friendly wave. Instead he pointed a finger, first at me and then at the office, like an angry trooper motioning to a speeding driver to pull her ass over.
We went into his office. I felt as though I were following the headsman to the town square to receive my just punishment. I counted five open bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth in the room. Marko didn’t sit down this time. We stood in front of his desk facing each other. His expression was one of contained fury.
“I thought you left town,” he said.
How could Marko have known what I’d revealed to only my mother? “Did Mama call you?”
“No. I called her.”
“When?”
“When I didn’t show up for the blessing of the Easter baskets. I called to apologize. Answer the question.”
“What question?”
“Mama said you went back to New York with steam coming out of your ass. That something important had come up. But instead you’re here.” He spat the last word out as though he’d chewed on something bitter.
I could sense my self-confidence waning. This is the problem with guilt. More than any other human emotion, it weakens the knees. “Mama misunderstood. The something that came up has nothing to do with my job.”
“How could it when you don’t have a job anymore?”
My face flushed. I feared it would burst before I figured out what to say. “Who… who told you I lost my job?”
“You did.”
“What?”
“You just told me you lost your job.”
I understood what he was telling me, but I couldn’t believe it. He’d bluffed me into revealing myself. That was a result I, the forensic securities analyst, usually secured when I interviewed people. Not the other way around. Yet it had just happened. Guilt did more than weaken your knees, I thought. It blinded you.
“Why did you ask?” I said, as I regained my senses enough to sustain a logical train of thought. “What made you suspect I’d been let go?”
“There’s smarts, and then there’s street smarts. One might get you a job in New York City. The other one might let you know when someone’s lost one.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re around here all the time. Not in New York where your job was. Real rocket science, huh?”
“I could have been on vacation.”
“Sure. Hartford just passed Bora Bora on the top ten list of vacation hot spots for the hoity-toity. Though you should be asking yourself why you’re here even if you lost your job. Why aren’t you in New York looking for a new one?”
“Because I want to find out what happened to my godfather.”
Lines sprang to Marko’s face. “Why?”
I still didn’t have an answer to that one, nor did I try to think of one. All I could think of was how hot it was in the room and how desperately I needed to reverse the trajectory of the conversation. I was the one with an agenda. I needed to ask the question. I had to impose my will on him. It’s what I did for a living, or at least what I used to do for money.
“Why couldn’t you make it for the blessing of the Easter baskets?” I said.
“Something came up.”
“Something related to my godfather’s business?”
“No. Something related to my business. We have a special guest. She flew in from LA. I had to pick her up at Bradley. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“When did you tell my godfather to leave Mama alone?”
Marko rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake… You’re back to that again? Who cares?”
“Humor me.”
“A year ago. No, maybe less. More like nine months.”
That was after my godfather’s trip to Crimea and the profitable turn in his business. “Did you agree to do that job for him — when you rode with him to Avon for protection — after you told him to leave Mama alone, or before?”
He circled around behind his desk, sat down, and drank from one of the open bottles. When he answered my question he looked straight at the wall to my side, not in my eyes.
“It was right after that. He came by a week later.”
“And it was a one-time thing. You never did a job with him again?”
Marko drank from the bottle again, puffed his cheeks out, and stared at the wall.
“Why won’t you answer me?”
He shook his head. “You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re making a complete fool of yourself in the community and you don’t see it. The guy was a stinking drunk. He fell down the stairs going to get a bottle of wine. Everyone knows it.”
“You’re still not answering my question.”
He grunted. “I don’t have to answer your question. You don’t mean nothing to me.”
I ordered myself to ignore those words. That’s all they were, I told myself. Words. He didn’t mean it. I was his little sister. I was his little sister and he loved me unconditionally.