“Same old case,” she said.
The guard inside was still watching, for sure.
“Well, good to see you,” he said, and she shook his hand.
“Just give me a half-block lead,” she whispered, and then she turned on her heels and headed down the street. He lit a cigarette and checked his watch.
A half block ahead she turned and made a come-along gesture, and then turned and continued walking, all shift and sway with the breeze tousling her hair and her beautiful (fucking beautiful, he thought) hips and ass perfectly restricted in her regulation stretch pants. You either wore pencil skirts with a wide belt and a white blouse, or you wore the pants and a white blouse.
He liked the way she waited for him by the cash register, standing with her hip cocked and gesturing with her hands out, as if to say, Here you are, finally. It was a classic coffee joint, somehow saved from the ravages of the original riots; the kind of place that most Corps workers avoided not only because it was old-fashioned, nothing like the canteen with its plastic modern chairs, but also because it was full of vets or men who looked like vets, and if there was one place you could meet without being noticed by other members of the Corps it would be full of potential clients, of patients waiting to be treated, or already treated, leaning into the counter in their old fatigues and sweating nervously into their soup.
A waitress in a yellow skirt and a yellow blouse with white ruffles and a name tag led them to a booth by the window.
“Well, here we are, breaking regulations again,” he said.
“That seems to be true,” she said. “In theory we should exchange bullshit information, no mention of the cases beyond the fact that we’re both bored and tired, that kind of thing.” They raised menus and looked them over and went into an exchange that began with “By the way, where are you from?”
She was from Flint. He was from Benton Harbor, not far from Lake Michigan. She was a Lake Huron girl, whatever that meant, and he was a Lake Michigan guy. (They agreed that you were either one or the other.) Huron girls contended with topographical tedium and high pollution levels. Michigan guys — she insisted — stared wistfully out at what they imagined was Chicago’s coast. They both agreed that Lake Superior types were cold and stoic in a good way, clean and pure like the water.
There was a moment of tension after he mentioned, offhandedly, that he would really enjoy — that it might even help him with the Internal afternoon — getting his hands on some good drugs, nothing too serious or against regulations, just something to spark his thought systems, to ease up the tension of his repetitious briefings with a punitively old-school agent. She didn’t say anything, just raised her brows and touched her nose. She had a birthmark, hardly visible, a small red-purple mark, and the second button of her blouse had come undone (or perhaps she’d unbuttoned it) and he could make out the sprinkle of freckles leading down to the shadow of cleavage. He looked away out the window and then back. She took a sip of her drink and then suddenly threw her head down and let her hair spread over the table and then, just as quickly, tossed her head up, so that it fell back into place.
“Oh, God,” she said. “We’re already in trouble.”
“How so?” he said. But she widened her eyes as if with mischief. He could get lost in those eyes, he thought. He looked away out the window — a vet, or at least someone who looked like one, lurked on the other side of the street, running his hands though his hair, staring in their direction — and then back. Her eyes widened again, the same way, and a tingle moved up from his toes to his groin. The birthmark saved him, drawing his attention away, and then the coffee arrived.
“I’ve heard things about your agent in charge,” she said.
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing that isn’t probably common knowledge, or whatever. He’s a bozo, a nut job, an old-schooler with his head stuck in the past, a fake, a phony, blah blah blah. I’m sure if you asked anybody they’d say the same about mine. But I heard something else, some rumor, and it made me a little sorry for you. I mean I’m jumping here. I’m taking a leap. I don’t even know you. I’m not going to pry. I wouldn’t do that anyway. You know, regulations. I just heard the guy’s an asshole. That’s basically it. Might’ve been more stuff to it, but that’s the gist.”
“That’s the gist? That’s it?”
“There’s more gist, but then, again, you know, regulations.”
“I can’t say much without risk of compromising. You know what they say: It’s not what you know it’s what you know and don’t let others know you know, something like that. I have that wrong, don’t I? It’s more like: if you know something and know it, then why not know it without letting others know…”
“This is when I’m supposed to laugh,” she said. She scanned the restaurant.
“I can say this much and not compromise. He says he was a historian. I mean he’s been in battle and knows what he’s talking about at the field level. It’s a little unclear if he was actually some kind of historian, but he talks like one when he’s in a bombastic mode, and then he quotes poets, things like that. He hasn’t had the treatment, of course — you know, wrong war, too old.”
When the food arrived there was a sudden sense of seriousness. He watched her eat, holding her fork and knife in the European manner, cutting with swift strokes.
“We shouldn’t meet here,” he said. “It’s too close to the office.”
“I thought the number of vets eating here would make us pretty invisible.”
“You had wayward tendencies, didn’t you?”
“Not really. I mean I do now, clearly.” Again she gave him the look. This time she kept her eyes wide and smiled, reaching out to touch his arm, running a finger along his scar, leaving it there for a second.
A busboy came and cleared the dishes into a plastic bucket. Singleton examined a smear of grease on his placemat — a map of pre-riot Michigan with drawings of emblematic crops and products: blueberries in the thumb region; rolls of paper and stacks of lumber and, of course, automobiles. The smear was near a town called Big Rapids, on the southern edge of what some people were starting to call the Zone of Anarchy. (Look, son, Klein had said. I can’t stand the lingo. They’re just making the lingo up as they go along. In any case, you can’t have a bunch of low-level law enforcement officers operating like fascists — which to my mind isn’t always such a bad thing — and simply call it anarchy. It’s a misuse of a word that is prone to misuse. What we got here is a situation in which the general public is not sure who’s doing the protecting. Some are taking the law into their own hands while others are going mad trying to live up to this so-called Year of Hate thing, and then you have the drugs, of course, and the music.)
The waitress returned, tapping the pad with her pencil. Her face was smothered in makeup. Bright blue glittery half-moons spread over her lids and down part of her cheek; her eyelids struggled against globs that clung to her lashes. She’d been through the riots and come out the other end with the same job in the same coffee shop.
“I don’t suppose you’d like more coffee. That is, if you want to continue your secret meeting.” She pointed over her shoulder. An agent, or someone dressed like one, was eating at the counter.
“We’d better split,” Singleton said.
“You folks let me know and I’ll find a way to keep him occupied,” the waitress said. “That is, if you give me a good tip. If you give me enough of a tip I’ll give you a tip. And my tip is to stay away from each other if you can. I don’t know much about what goes on over there, but it seems like it’s always the ones that come together that never return together, if you know what I mean.”