Eat burger then sleep, the note reads.
So simple. If only.
I smiled at her.
She smiled back.
Lovely teeth.
Very different story from the one I got when my secretary flashed his choppers, which looked like they’d been soaked in caramel every night for many years.
My own teeth, I don’t mind informing you, were in excellent condition in those days, as were many other aspects of my person. My male colleagues at the transactions firm liked me tremendously and even went so far as to call me Champ and Sport. It will come as no surprise then that I was far from being unpopular with certain female individuals, and that I even had one or two special friends.
How can I help you? I said.
Don’t you know who I am? she said.
Why do you ask?
Because that’s a very, very blank look on your face.
Of course I know who you are.
Good. What have you learned?
Learned?
Yes, learned.
Her hair and the light were collaborating even more nicely now that she was sitting down, and I have to say I had a hard time keeping my eyes off it. Her eyes, too, were worth noting — they were a very pale gray ….
Pale blue, she said. It must be the light — in a more robust light they are clearly blue. But thank you for noticing.
Did you, ahem, just say something? I said.
She frowned.
I asked you if you had followed him, hello, as per our agreement.
Of course I did, I said.
When?
Last night.
And?
And I learned some very interesting things.
Elaborate.
After a moment, I did so. I told her that at approximately 5 p.m. the previous evening I had followed him out of his office on the west side and had trailed him across town. Subject had walked briskly, one might even say, without overpresumption, purposefully.
He is purposeful.
Yes, I could see that.
Go on.
On the way across town, Subject had stopped four times. Once for a chocolate bar at a newsstand; once for a cake of heavy-duty soap at a hardware store; once outside the window of a gift shop; once in an alley where he knocked twice on a green metal door, after which I momentarily lost sight of him.
Lost sight of him how? Did he go in the door? Did someone answer?
I’m not sure.
At this juncture, she leaned forward and looked at me with a curious expression.
Incidentally, that’s quite a bruise, she said.
It was. I had checked it several times over the course of the afternoon in the mirror that hung next to my desk. The bruise, above my right temple, had made its way through several colors, and now — I took a quick look — seemed to have settled into a deep violet ringed with indigo and brown.
How did you get it?
I’m not sure.
You don’t seem to be sure about a lot of things.
This was definitely true, but I decided not to answer. Instead, I just nodded, noncommittally, and smiled.
She asked me if I had taken any aspirin.
I said I had.
So you must have lost him after that.
After what?
After he knocked twice on the green metal door.
The funny thing is I didn’t, I said. It’s true that he got away from me for a minute or two, but I caught up with him just as he was entering a private residence on the east side.
Who lives there?
I gave her the name.
So that’s it.
This was not put as a question and I did not treat it like one. My assignment, and I suddenly found I remembered it all, had been to follow the individual and to provide my client with a name. I had done so. She was satisfied, and I was satisfied and, once she had paid me the outstanding portion of my fee, we would leave it at that. Clearly, as one thinks to one’s self, I had a future in this business, and would soon enough find myself in a position to reduce my hours at the transactions firm. While it was true that I would miss certain aspects of the work, there was no doubt in my mind that brighter things lay in store for me as an investigator, and I can say with all surety that I was not wrong.
I couldn’t be wrong.
I mean compared to the way it has worked out, which is differently. I am no longer an investigator and I would not call things bright. And yet at that moment they were. A beautiful client sat in a chair opposite me, I had a secretary, an office, and had somehow, in carrying out my duties, earned myself a bruise.
Can I offer you a drink? I said.
I don’t think so, she said.
Are you sure? It’s said that I have a winning personality.
How much do I owe you?
I told her.
She stood up to leave.
I think that’s how it went, because at precisely the moment I asked her to share a drink with me, or thought I did, the room began to go very dark and then very light and I saw some things. I saw, for instance, that while I had been interacting with my client, someone else had come into the office and was conversing with my secretary. My secretary was not smiling. He was nodding and looking meaningfully and not altogether pleasantly at the door to my office, and the individual he was interacting with was holding a gun.
Excuse me a moment, I said.
My client was standing before me holding out a few bills. I walked quickly around her and jerked open the door to the front office. My secretary was sitting there, smiling, all alone.
Brush your fucking teeth, I said.
Are you all right? my client said.
I turned away from my secretary, bowed, and assured her that I was. I also told her that it had been an absolute pleasure carrying out her assignment, and that if she should have any future need of an investigator, she could call me.
Good, she said.
Excellent, I said.
She handed me the money, shook, I think, my hand, nodded at my secretary, and left.
I was somewhat less comfortable than I like to be after that. I stood for a time in the doorway, between my room and my secretary’s, listing a little, first to one side then to the other, and all the while my secretary, apparently not the slightest bit nonplussed by my outburst, spoke to me. He spoke to me quietly and soothingly about the quality of the client who had just left — about her coat and about where, in his opinion, the coat had been purchased. He spoke to me about her hair and the line of her jawbone and about her blue eyes, which set off to such effect the large and tasteful rock she had been wearing around her neck. He spoke to me about the job, about how well I had carried it out, and about how well I had interacted with the client, and after he had gone on for some time in this vein I finally got it.
You want me to pay you, right? I said.
Yes, immediately please.
I gave him the money the client had handed me, and after counting it twice, somewhat ostentatiously licking his thumb in the process, he slipped it into his pocket, presumably satisfied. Then he went on talking for a while. He talked mostly about his mother — a favorite subject of his — and about a house they had once visited on a lake long ago. The house, which had belonged to his mother’s employer, had sat on a small promontory overlooking the enormous lake, which was notable both for its color — red — and its shape — a near perfect horseshoe. Each day, he and his mother would rise early and row out onto the lake, where, in my secretary’s phrase, surrounded by mist and bird song they would drop their lines. While they fished, and the fishing was excellent — they ate of it every night, his mother undertaking the bulk of the cleaning, so many small wet shapes, as my secretary put it, in the bucket, on the plate — his mother would tell him stories. Son, she would say, and she would tell him about something wonderful that had happened before he was born. She had been unusually old for a mother, so old it had always seemed to my secretary incredible that she had been able to pull it off, a point with which I, now leaning into the doorframe, or so I thought, completely concurred.