“We just finished rehearsing, and I saw your light,” he said. “You interested in a nightcap?”
“I’m interested in someone with long, delicate fingers and a surgeon’s deft touch.”
I held out my hand, which was bleeding pretty heavily from my bungled probing.
“Vic! Blood makes me throw up.”
I thought he was joking, but his face actually did have a greenish sheen.
“I’ll rinse it off,” I said, “if you’ll take this splinter out for me. Please! I’ll even open my last bottle of Torgiano for you.”
He made a face but took the tweezers from me.
“You go rinse this off until it’s not bleeding,” he said, “or you’ll be removing lasagna from it along with the blood.”
When I got myself cleaned up, he clamped my hand between his knees as if it were a cello. He was sweating, but he had the chip out fairly fast. He turned his head while I wrapped the hand in a towel.
“What is this?” He held the chip under the light.
“A metal fragment. A palette knife exploded in my hand.”
“A palette . . . No, don’t explain. I’m happier not knowing. And I don’t know about you, but I need something stronger than red wine right now.”
I got out a bottle of Longrow. It was a small-batch single malt that my most important client, Darraugh Graham, had brought me from Edinburgh. It went down like liquid gold. By the time I’d had my second glass and followed Jake into my bedroom, I’d almost forgotten the throbbing in my hand.
28
Mourning Coffee
When my cell phone rang four hours later, at first I incorporated it into my sleep. I was in Kiev, and the Body Artist, painted like a Russian Easter egg, was madly pulling ropes to ring church bells all across the city. The ringing stopped, then started again almost at once.
“I know the Bottesini,” Jake muttered. “I don’t have to rehearse it.”
“Neither do I,” I said, but I got up and found my phone, in the pocket of the jeans I’d dropped on the floor last night.
My call log showed the same person had called three times. The phone was chirruping to tell me I had new voice mail, new text messages. r u there? ansir!
My head was too blurry from a short night on top of a gun battle to call back. I stumbled, shivering, down the hall to the bathroom. Seven in the morning, still dark. I didn’t think winter would ever end.
I stood under the shower, washing sleep out of my face, while my phone rang again from the towel shelf. On the caller’s fifth try, I answered before it rolled over to voice mail.
“Who is this?” It was a husky whisper.
My least favorite conversational gambit. “V. I. Warshawski. Who is this?”
“I . . . Clara. I’m supposed to be at mass in fifteen minutes. I need to see you. There’s a coffee shop on Blue Island a block from the school.”
A truck or bus roaring by made it hard to hear her; I shouted over the noise that I’d be there in twenty minutes. Jake didn’t wake up as I banged drawers and doors open and shut, pulling on sweaters, jeans, my practical heavy boots. For a perverse moment, I wanted to yank the blankets off, freeze his toes, force him to wake up, but he’d done surgery on me that turned him green, he’d spent the night, he’d made me feel less alone and more beautiful than I usually do.
My right hand was swollen, the palm a purply brown. When I couldn’t get a glove over it, I stuffed it into an oven mitt, grabbed my coat and gun, and ran down the back stairs to the alley, where I’d parked last night. Once I was in the car, I put the Smith & Wesson on the seat, under my coat, wondering how well I’d aim if I had to shoot left-handed.
Lake Shore Drive is a parking lot this time of day, but the side streets weren’t much better—parents dropping kids off at school blocked most of the roads. It took half an hour to reach the coffee shop, a franchise of one of the big chains, on Blue Island. I didn’t see Clara Guaman at first and thought she’d gotten fed up with waiting. However, while I stood in line for the espresso I urgently needed, Clara emerged from the shadows at the back.
“I thought you’d never get here. I have to get to class before they miss me.”
“I’ll walk up with you. We can talk on the way.”
“No! I don’t want anyone to see you with me. Come over here where it’s dark.”
She headed toward the back, to an alcove near the doors to the toilets. I collected my drink and joined her. This was the only coffee shop close to her school, and it was filled with kids on their way to class, so I didn’t think she’d be particularly anonymous. At least so far no one had called out to her.
Once we were in the alcove, she couldn’t seem to get to the point. She fiddled with her phone and kept peering around the corner to see who was standing in line.
“What’s going on, Clara?” I tried to keep irritability out of my voice, but my short night made me not only foggy but grumpy.