“Not right now, thank you,” she said once more.
I popped up and opened a cabinet door set in the shelves of little sculptures and books in every language from Latin to Esperanto. The liquor cabinet had a twenty-eight-year-old Delord Armagnac. I poured myself a double shot.
“Sure I can’t tempt you?” I said to the woman who was reminding me more and more of the king’s black rook.
“Not yet.”
Sitting down again, I asked Oliya, “Do you know the players in the game I’m playing?”
“No. When I asked I was told that you would have most of that information.”
“Do you know Zyron International?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever worked for them?”
“I can’t give information about Int-Op or anyone that we have or have not provided with our services.”
“Okay. That’s good. But what if I’m having a problem with a company like that and part of your job would be putting you at odds with them?”
“If that were the case, Joe, I wouldn’t be here.”
Our eyes met.
“You look pretty tough,” I noted.
“Sometimes you have to fight.” Her manner was nonchalant. “But no matter how tough anyone is, there’s always somebody stronger, luckier, or smarter. I try to avoid confrontation. That makes it better for me and my clients.”
I sipped my brandy.
“So,” I said, my talking tongue more than satisfied by the alcohol. “What if I were to tell you that I didn’t want or need your services?”
Suddenly the stony-eyed young woman’s face was vulnerable. Even the suggestion that I might dismiss her was completely unexpected.
“I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me, Joe.”
“Why you keep usin’ my first name like we’re friends? Don’t you usually refer to your clients as mister and miss?”
She had a smile that was something to behold. It felt as if I had been walking on a paved road that gave way to pounded earth that then became a less-trodden path through a wood. There I come upon a peasant woman tilling the soil with a huge hoe made from the horn of some beast of burden. That path could have been anywhere in the world. And that woman was the reason there’s life anywhere. She was both a fortress wall and the only home anyone would ever need.
All of that in a smile.
“Part of my instruction was to call you by your first name, Mr. Oliver.”
I took in a deep breath right then. Melquarth was a good friend in spite of his close relationship with evil. His understanding of the world led him to hire this woman of violence and defense. As much as I wanted to deny it, there was something about her that was right.
“To answer your question,” she said, her tone now lighter, “I’ve been assigned to protect you. If you ask me to leave, then of course I will, but I’d have to call Int-Op. If they tell me to break off I’d move on. But if they say to stay and protect you I’d try my best.”
I looked at her, thinking about that universal woman wielding her great horn.
“Okay, then,” I said. “You stayin’ here?”
“That would be best.”
“The blue bedroom upstairs is mine. You can have either of the other two.”
She stood, grabbed her bags, and headed up.
“We can talk about my troubles and your services in the morning,” I told her back.
I waited a quarter hour, savoring the drink. While there I looked at my phone and saw there was a text from Mel.
Her name is Oliya and she’s the best Int-Op has to offer.
After that I went upstairs and tumbled into a sleep that was better than I’d had in days, maybe even years.
20
It was one of the few times in my life that I overslept. The stone house was quiet as a tomb and the idea of being concealed by the earth itself dispelled all fear.
I showered, shaved, and dressed in a dark suit I’d brought along to Atlanta. That done, I was ready to go downstairs.
There Oliya was seated in the blue chair — knitting. She had on a bright yellow, loose-fitting jumpsuit, her feet tucked up under her.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning, Mr. Oliver.”
“You can call me Joe,” I allowed. “I just wondered why you were so familiar.”
She smiled, gave a quick nod, and went back to her knitwork.
I ventured out to the kitchen, where I made coffee and canned toast.
Twenty minutes later, back in the living room, the stocky fingers of my bodyguard were still furiously at work.
I sat and watched her for a while.
“Today,” I announced. Int-Op 17 put down her needles and cloth. “I won’t be needing you because I’m not doing anything that has to do with the situation you’ve been hired for.”
“I could come along anyway,” she offered.
“I’m gonna go see a couple of old friends. You being there just wouldn’t work.”
Looking at me, she nodded and kept on looking.
“Maybe I could do something else for you.”
“Not really. You got that special skill set. I wouldn’t wanna dull it down with grocery shopping and laundry duty.”
Oliya smiled using her teeth and then went back to her woolly task.
Before leaving, Mel had shown me around his underground domain. Off the kitchen there was a small armory stacked with hunting rifles, shotguns, semiautomatics, fully automatics, and one or two specialized firearms designed for assassination. The arsenal had everything from Teflon to poison bullets. In an upstairs closet there was a chest of Morgan silver dollars, all of them shiny and dated from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.
A few hours after Mel had left me he sent a text that said, E-key in mag-case under back front wheel. There was a photograph of a six-year-old nut-brown Kia Soul attached to the text. The car was pictured in the area where Mel had parked his limo.
So, I counted out 250 silver dollars, bid good day to my bodyguard, and headed out to a very special place.
Sometimes, when one finds oneself cheek by jowl with a brick wall of indeterminate height and thickness, it might behoove that clandestine traveler to turn away to seek access less daunting. So I ventured out from the Bronx to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The address was not far from Roger Ferris, though the neighborhood was not nearly as posh.
That’s one of the things I like about New York — rich and poor are never that far apart. Walking down the street, living one block over, or descending the subway stairs — New Yorkers of every class are continually rubbing shoulders.
The six-story walk-up apartment building was on Seventy-Seventh Street. I walked up the dozen or so stairs of the stoop and looked for her name among the buzzers.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Loretta. It’s Joe Oliver.”
“Oh. What do you want?”
“To come upstairs and talk to him.”
“Is he expecting you?”
For some reason I never was bothered by Loretta Gorman’s rudeness. She was a liberal New Yorker and therefore, despite her whiteness, she had little tolerance for cops or ex-cops. And since she had moved in with her boyfriend, her patience had worn even thinner.
“No, he’s not,” I said, “but I’m sure he’d like to see me.”
Silence. I was sure she had gone to her boyfriend trying to talk him out of letting me upstairs.
Maybe three minutes later she said, “Okay, then. Come on up, I guess.”
The buzzer screamed and I pushed the door open.
The one-lane staircase snaked all the way to floor six, apartment 27.
I had to knock. She kept me waiting a few minutes more before opening up.
Ms. Gorman stood five and a half feet with a sleek figure and blond hair cut short. She wore skinny black jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her eyes were an impossibly light blue. It would be hard to make eyes that lovely challenging, but Loretta managed it.