I have a compact kitchen, a dining area off the front room, a bedroom, a painting studio with north windows, and a study jammed with small computers and a couple of thousand books. I keep a brand-new seventeen-foot Tuffy Esox fishing boat and an older Oldsmobile in a private parking garage up the block. There's another place, quite a bit like it, also paid off, in New Orleans.
When I say the apartments are paid off, I'm not bragging. I'm worried. I screwed up. The run-in with the mob generated quite a bit of cash. I'd never been rich before, and when the money came in, I managed to ignore the annoying buzzing sound in the background. The buzzing sound was my accountant, of course, and she was trying to remind me that I lived in Minnesota, that 40 percent of every dime I earned went for income taxes, either state or federal, plus a couple of more percentages for Social Security and etc. The etc., I suspect, is something I don't want to know about.
Looking back, I shouldn't have paid off the houses. And the trip to Paris and the C“te sometimes seems a tad excessive. I spent a lot of money on food, booze, and women and thoroughly field-tested a faulty baccarat system on the tables at Monte Carlo and what was left, I wasted.
When I got back from France, I was still fairly complacent about the state of my finances. Then the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Revenue showed up. Neither exactly had hat in hand. Tch. I didn't have holes in my socks, but I could use some cash. Soon. Very soon. Like before the fall quarterly estimate was due.
"So what's in Memphis?" Chaminade asked during breakfast, spreading marmalade on her English muffin.
" Beale Street," I suggested.
"Last time I was in Memphis " – she rolled her eyes up and thought about it – "must have been ten or eleven years ago."
"A mere child."
She ignored me. "I went over to Beale Street, you know, because of the blues. I'd been listening to a Memphis Slim tape; it had this great piece called 'He Flew the Coop.'. I don't know. Anyway, I went over to Beale, and the whole street was boarded up for urban renewal. I found a big goddamned statue of? Who? Guess."
"W. C. Handy?"
"Nope. Elvis. Right there at the top of Beale. They had a bust of Handy stuck away in a little park. Those Memphis folks got style." She popped the last bite of muffin into her mouth, licked her fingers, split another muffin in half, and popped it into the toaster.
"I don't know the place very well. Seems kind of trashy, in a likable way. The food's good," I said.
I pass through Memphis twice a year, eat a pile of ribs, and move on. From St. Paul to St. Louis is a brutal day's drive. From there you can make it to New Orleans in another day if you don't fool around in Memphis.
When the muffins popped up, Chaminade spread a gob of butter on them, not looking at me. "When you get back."
"Yeah?" But I knew what was coming. I'd been brooding about it for a couple of weeks.
"I'll be out of here." She said it in such a conversational way that we might have been talking about grocery shopping or new wallpaper.
"We were getting along," I said tentatively.
"We were. Wonderfully. Up to a point. Then it stopped. The problem is, I'm something between number four and six on your list of priorities. The way I see it, there's not much prospect of moving up."
"If you could wait until I get back."
"You could go to Memphis some other time."
"I've got to go today."
She shrugged. "See?"
"Obligations. A friend," I said defensively.
"I'm a friend, too," she said.
"You don't need help."
"See?"
Chaminade looked down the room at the cat, who was daintily picking his way across a radiator to a window. He saw us watching and posed, as cats do, one front foot frozen in midair. Sunlight rippled across his orange coat; there was a potted geranium sitting on a board at the end of the radiator, and the orange fur against the green leaves, all framed by the window, made a nice composition. Beyond the cat, through the window out on the river, a towboat pushed a rust red barge full of coal upstream toward the power plant. Pigeons wheeled overhead, little impressionist smudges against the faultless blue sky. It was quiet and beautiful.
"I'll miss the cat," she said sadly. "And the river."
I carry a small wooden box from Poland in my overnight bag. On the flight between St. Paul and Memphis, I got it out. Inside, wrapped in a square of rough silk, were seventy-eight cards, the Waite-Rider tarot deck. I did a couple of spreads. The Empress dominated both of them.
There's nothing supernatural about the tarot. Not the way I use it, as a gaming system. Formal game systems, the kind developed by the military, were intended to force planners out of habitual modes of thinking and to test new theories. The tarot is less structured than the formal systems, but it still forces you outside your preconceptions.
So I had the Empress dominating two separate spreads. In my interpretive system the Empress represents women, new enterprises, new creations, new movements. There's an overtone of politics and a suggestion of sex. That's roughly parallel to the "magic" interpretation, but I don't believe in that superstitious shit.
I sat back and thought about it as the river unwound two thousand feet below. The Empress.
Chaminade? Or someone I hadn't yet met?
Memphis from the air looks like any other city from the air, except greener. Just before we landed, the pilot said the ground temperature was ninety-three and the humidity was 87 percent. A Turkish bath.
When I came through the gate carrying an overnight bag and a portable computer, a tall, balding black guy, forty or so, was leaning on the railing that separated the passenger and waiting areas. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, thin face, and high cheekbones, he might have looked like Gandhi. He didn't. He brought to mind a mercenary who had been blinded by a white phosphorus grenade in Biafra, a long time ago and far, far away. This guy wasn't blind, though. He was looking the passengers over, one by one, and finally picked on me.
"You Kidd?" he asked. His voice was tough, abrupt.
"Yeah. Who are you?" He was already walking away, and I trailed behind with my bags.
"John," he said over his shoulder. "You got a suitcase? Besides that stuff?"
"No. John what?"
He thought it over, but not very hard. "Smith."
If he didn't want to talk, I wasn't going to worry about it. He led the way to a two-year-old Chevrolet, one of the bigger models in a nondescript green. We were halfway downtown, sitting at a red light, before Smith said another word.
"I'm not sure we need you." He was staring straight out over the steering wheel.
"I don't know if I want to join up," I said.
"Bobby says you're some kind of complicated computer crook." He still wouldn't face me. "You don't look like a computer crook. You look like a boxer."
"I'm a painter," I said. "I've been hit in the nose a couple of times. The docs never got it quite right."
Now he turned, vertical lines crinkling the space between his eyebrows. "A painter? That's not what Bobby said."
"I do computer work to make a living. That's the only way Bobby knows me."
"Huh." The light changed, and we were rolling again. "Can't make a living at painting?"
"Not yet. Maybe in five years."
"You paint ducks?"
"No. I don't paint ducks, barns, sailboats, lighthouses, pheasants, rusty farm machinery, sunsets, jumping fish, birch trees, or any kind of hunting dogs. And I don't put a little pink glow of the setting sun between groups of warm nineteenth-century farmhouses with hay sticking out of the lofts of the barns in back."
"Eakins painted hunters. Homer painted fish."
"Damn well, too."
"So who do you like? Artists?"
"Rembrandt. Ingres. Degas. Egon Schiele. Like that. Guys who could draw. People who like color. Gauguin. Living guys, maybe Jim Dine. Wolf Kahn. A couple of personal friends. Why?"
"I do some. art." He said it reluctantly, almost as a confession.