Peril

STARK

She took his hands and placed them in the tray.

“So, things good with you?”

Stark nodded.

Lucia was a brown swollen berry of a woman. Her hair was black but without shine, and her voice bore the cadences of the peasant island from which she’d come. But she had a ready smile, and she did a good job on his nails, and Stark found it refreshing to be touched by someone who wanted nothing from him but a generous tip.

“You got your health, that’s the main thing, no?” Lucia asked.

Stark remembered a line from Neruda, how on certain days the smell of aftershave made him sob. He knew well what the poet meant. On certain days something mournful hung in the air. Everything was draped in black crepe. He could not predict when such a day would come, nor ever fathom why it came. He knew only that on such occasions death seemed even sweeter than usual, and he felt an unmistakable longing to be rid of life’s unseemly detritus, the body’s crude humiliations, the idle patter of the streets, the heavy sense that nothing could be rescued from the stale water in which all things floated briefly and then sank. Each breath seemed empty, and he could find no reason to take it. It simply happened. He breathed. He didn’t will it, or want it. His lungs sucked in air, and this reflexive grasp for life struck him as no less absurd than Lucia’s mindless chatter, or the way her fat fingers massaged his own. It was all part of the same purely mechanistic design, without direction or purpose or will, desperate but not obviously so, the desperation built into the machine, its slimy oil. The hours were unbearable, and so you filled them with whatever you could in the same desperate way the lungs filled with air. That was the design, and Stark thought that one simple stern admonition must be tacked to the wall of every chromosome: Just get through it.

Lucia began to clean beneath the nails with a pointed wooden stick.

“You got pretty hands,” she said. “You got hands like a woman.”

Stark knew that this was not true. His hands, despite the creams and oils, were rough, his veins were raised and faintly blue. His fingers were stubby rather than tapered, and the pink nails were marked with milky-white specks. His father, the mill worker, had had rough, unattractive hands. So had his mother, the gray lady who washed the halls of the building they lived in, and in which she may well have entertained the squat little landlord on those months when she’d fallen behind in the rent.

“You want I should do the toes?” Lucia was blowing gently on his fingers now. “Some men, I do the toes.”

Stark shook his head, drew a twenty from the breast pocket of his jacket, and handed it to Lucia.

“Thank you,” she said happily. “I do good job, no?”

“Excellent, as always,” Stark told her.

On the street he tried to admire the day, the sunlight, the warm spring air. But it continued to bother him, this thing that had begun to trouble him as he sat in Washington Square and was now dragging his mood lower and lower. At the time he’d thought it had something to do with Marisol, but now he understood that it had to do with Mortimer, the new job he’d brought him, the woman he had to find for Mortimer’s friend.

Something was wrong.

And this something wrong began with the request itself, the fact that during all the long years of that association, Mortimer had never before asked a favor of him. Nor had he ever expressed the slightest hesitance in bringing him a new client. Now Mortimer had both asked for a favor and appeared unsure about the client he’d brought him. In Stark’s experience, such changes never boded well. With Lockridge, he’d noticed an unexpectedly snide look when he’d told him that he’d been unable to find Marisol. This response had signaled not only that Lockridge already knew that Marisol had been found, but that finding her had been only the first stage of a darker plot. Now he had the same uneasy feeling about Mortimer.

So just who was the phantom friend Mortimer claimed to have but would not identify?

And what did this “friend” intend to do when his missing wife was found?

There was something wrong with the whole thing, Stark decided, something left out or hidden. Mortimer wasn’t telling him the whole story, and in recognizing that austere fact, Stark felt a terrible sense that his old associate had crossed a fateful line. After all, Mortimer’s saving grace had always been that he clearly understood his own substantial limitations, the fact that in any test of wit or will he would surely come out the loser. For that reason Stark had never doubted that Mortimer would play straight with him, if for no other reason than to do otherwise would inevitably spell disaster. But now Stark suspected that Mortimer had taken a crooked road.

But why?