Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 49. Death in the Afternoon

I hadn’t heard from Clancy since the evening of our dinner non-event and I felt a little guilty about not being kinder to him on that occasion, so when the preparations for the Przewalski show were well in hand I went round to Clancy’s Bar one afternoon. The place was crowded as usual and Himself was visible sitting at a table with a striking blonde who’d had some work done. She didn’t have a sign around her neck that said I’M SLEEPING WITH HIM but she might as well have. They were leaning towards each other in a sleeping-together kind of way while he lit her cigarette and she lit his fire. She had very thin arms.

I was hoping to disappear unnoticed but of course he saw me.

‘Hi, Angelica,’ he said with the front of his voice. ‘Come and join us.’ So I did. ‘The world doesn’t stand still,’ his face said to me very plainly.

‘Go for it, Clance,’ my face answered.

He interrupted our wordless conversation to introduce Blondie.

‘Angelica, this is Nikki. Nikki, Angelica.’ We shook hands. ‘Angelica is one of my oldest friends,’ he said smoothly.

‘Carries her years well,’ said Nikki.

‘And without surgical assistance,’ I replied.

‘Nikki’s published a monograph on Tanagra figurines,’ boasted Clancy.

Nikki was looking into the distance, humming the seguidilla from Act I of Carmen softly to herself. She was the right age for Dad’s ex-mid-life crisis, thirty-five or so, only five years older than I. Sitting there in her little cotton print with her thin arms and her worked-on face. The history-of-art lecturer who’d taken her to Rome, had he gone back to his wife?

‘Who was the publisher?’ I asked her.

‘University of California Press. Are you interested in Tanagra?’

‘My father had a couple of books on it. He said that although the pieces were small they had a bigness about them because of the wholeness of the artists’ vision. They reminded him of Daumier in the way the gesture contained the figure.’

‘What’s your last name?’ she asked me.

‘Greenberg.’

She nodded several times, made a ‘Whaddaya gonna do?’ gesture, and reached for a fresh cigarette.

‘Angelica,’ said Clancy. ‘What’re you drinking?’

‘Jack Daniel’s, please, a small one.’

‘Rocks? Water?’

‘No, just as it comes from the bottle.’

When Javier brought my drink I raised my glass to Nikki and Clancy.

‘Here’s luck,’ I said, downed it and left.