“Guido,” I said, glancing up, “meet Pisces.”
He nodded to her. “How’s it going?”
“Well enough,” she said. She had her eyes on my coffee cup, or the steam rising from it. I was cold in jeans and a wool jacket. Her exposed arms were all goose bumps. I held out my cup to her.
“Would you like some?” I asked.
“Cream and sugar?” she asked.
“Cream, no sugar.”
She shrugged, condescending, but she took the offered cup. Sugar wouldn’t have hurt her figure. She was skinny, but very muscular. When she moved her body had the assertive thrust of an athlete.
“So, Pisces,” I said. “It’s late and there doesn’t seem to be much business out here. Can I give you a lift to that shelter I mentioned?”
“I don’t know. It is pretty cold tonight, but I hate going to those places. Do you live around here?”
“No. I live in San Francisco. I’m only in L.A. working for a few days.”
“You have a hotel?”
“I’m staying at Guido’s.”
She looked at Guido and waited for him to say something. He turned on me.
“Why do you always do this to me, Maggie?”
“Do what?” I asked with faux innocence.
“We were going to Langer’s to get some pastrami,” he groused. “We saw her on the way, so we detoured to get her on film. That’s great. But do we have to do a Mother Theresa shtick, too?”
“I love it when you’re forceful,” I said, patting his cheek. “Pisces, you want to get something to eat with us?”
“That would be fine,” she said, and smiled wryly at Guido. “Nice of you to ask.”
We walked the half block to Langer’s Deli like a little family group out for the evening: Mom, Dad, and baby hooker.
The restaurant is a New York – style neighborhood eatery, 1950s linoleum and glass meat cases, an institution left behind when the old neighbors moved out of MacArthur Park and El Salvador moved in. Guido claims it has the best pastrami in the world.
As soon as we got inside, Pisces excused herself to go to the rest room. Guido and I found a booth in the middle where she could find us when she was finished.
Guido pried a half-sour pickle out of the pot on the table, and took a bite. He smiled at me while he chewed.
“What?” I said.
“I was just thinking,” he said. “There any kids hooking on the street in San Francisco?”
“Of course.”
“And chubby little bambinos up there in model day-care palaces?”
“What’s your question?”
“Just curious why you had to come to L.A. to film.”
“The child psychologist who is consulting on the script agrees with me that we want to depict a broad range of child-raising experiences. You’re always so cautious, Guido. I want to take the lid off on this one. I want to include some kids most people never see.”
“So go to Natchitoches, Louisiana, or Bismarck, North Dakota,” he said. “You didn’t have to come to L.A. to film a face in the dark, or kids on a slide. You could have taken care of that shit in your own neighborhood.”
“You sound like the grant coordinator. Are you asking me to defend the project?”
“Nope.” He leaned forward and used the pickle as a pointer aimed at my nose. “Have you called Mike Flint?”
“Hadn’t occurred to me to do so,” I said, defensive. Another thing that makes Guido such a good filmmaker is his unerring insight. Sometimes I just hate him.
Guido reached into his pocket, fiddled through some change, and slid two dimes across the table toward me.
“Should I know what the dimes are for?” I asked, knowing full well.
“Make the call.”
I thought about it. I had been thinking about it for six months. Mike Flint and I had started something about a year earlier that had never been resolved. As hard as I had fallen for Flint, from the beginning I knew that anything beyond carpe diem was hopeless. He was a detective with twenty-two years on the LAPD. A big-city dick, with a full share of the reactionary attitudes that implies. Beyond that, he was a true and loyal friend, a man with deep compassion, great thighs. He made me laugh.
I could live with his opinions – I love a good argument and he always offered plenty to argue about. The sticking point was that until he had put in his twenty-five years on the force he was stuck in L.A. And after that, he envisioned himself retiring to a cabin so deep in the woods that the sound of drive-by gunfire could only be heard on the six-o’clock news. He longed for quietude.
Simply put, Mike and I had incompatible geography. I hate L.A., but I’m not big on flannel shirts and bear meat. As I said, it was hopeless. I had had six months to get used to that reality. What I could not understand was why I kept having this running conversation with Mike Flint in my head. Why my eyes began to roll back every time I thought about the texture of the soft hair at the back of his neck.
Pisces came back from the rest room. I slid deeper into the booth to make room for her beside me. Once she sat down, I couldn’t get out to use the telephone. I pushed the dimes back to Guido.
“Guido says the pastrami here is worth risking your life for,” I said to Pisces. “How do you feel about pastrami?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “May I have some salad with it?”
“Anything you want,” I said, glaring at the tooth-sucking expression on Guido’s chiseled face.
“Thank you,” Pisces said. “I’m really hungry now that I smell food.”
Guido turned his attention to the girl, studied her with his quick intensity. In the rest room she had brushed her hair back from her face, wiped off most of the makeup, and pulled up the top of her skimpy dress to cover her shoulders. Without all the goo she was a pretty little girl with wide, dark brown eyes and good skin. She seemed to have transformed her streetwise attitude as well as her appearance.
“You have nice manners for a lady of the evening,” Guido said as she spread a paper napkin on her lap. “Where you from, kid?”
“Here,” she said, shrugging.
“Here, like L.A.?”
“Sort of.”
“Southern California, anyway, right? You sound like a local.” She giggled a little. “You can’t tell that. Everyone knows there is no California accent.”
“Wrong,” he corrected. “It’s Brooklyn that has no accent. Unless you’re from Chicago.”
She laughed politely. She picked up a pickle, bit off the end of it, and screwed up her face at the sourness.
If I had felt at all protective of her before, I felt doubly so as I watched her. This was not a child raised in the streets. Guido had been correct about her manners. There was a sophistication about her, a social easiness, that comes with a certain careful upbringing. She did not appear to be on drugs. This kid was somebody’s baby girl. The question that began to eat away at me was: Who had lost her?
A senior-citizen waitress came and rested her soft hip against the end of the table. She gave us a long, nosy inspection. “Have you decided?”
Guido looked at Pisces and me. “Can I order for everyone? There’s an art to eating pastrami. It has to be done just right to get the full effect.”
“We’re in your hands,” I said, and Pisces giggled again.
Guido faced the waitress. “We’ll have three pastramis on rye, with yellow mustard – none of that gray poop. Three cream sodas, and one dinner salad, not slaw, on the side. And that’s all.”
“A man who knows his mind,” the waitress said. “Be right back with the salad.”
She was true to her word; the salad came immediately. While Pisces ate, Guido and I talked about the footage we had shot in Encino at a model day-care center. I couldn’t get very excited about it. I knew the real story about children was sitting on the banquette next to me.