Nighthawks, Baltimore, 1947
Sitting in my usual booth. One of three in the postage stamp Little Castle diner on Holabird. Mary waddles over and pours me another cup. Not much else for her to do on a rainy midnight but push an oily slick from one side of the counter to another with a rag that probably greased the gears of a tank track a few years ago.
Whatever you do, don’t eat the burgers. Owner had this bright idea to use goat cheese instead of good old yellow. Something about a unique food experience, says Mary. “Unique” is an understatement.
Not sure why I chose this dump except for the coffee. Not sure why I stay.
Headlights strafe the interior and a Packard rumbles to a stop out front. Drizzle obscures the windshield, but I don't need details to know who's in that car. Mary smooths her dirty apron. I catch myself checking my haircut in the rust-spotted chrome of the napkin dispenser.
Erin Kennedy shoves the diner door open, jangling a bell, and rattling the plate glass windows. Hitler would have pissed his little brown uniform if he’d had to face this woman in a bad mood. Ex-girlfriend. For my sins.
“What do you know, Bart?” she says. She pulls out some napkins, spreads them on the green plastic of the banquette opposite me. Slides in, careful to keep the paper between her coat and the seat.
“Should I know anything?” It's not usually a good idea to say much to Erin, since every word can and will be used against you, but it's polite to reply. She tips her chin thing at Mary, and right away there’s more coffee on the table. Miracle: an un-chipped cup.
Erin turns her green eyes on me. “Sure, there’s plenty. You should know that Da was moving some things from one warehouse to another.” She pauses like I'm going to say something, but waiting is one of my better habits. “Some of those things didn’t get to where they were supposed to go.”
I think, stuff happens to stuff like her father deals with.
“You should know,” she goes on, “that Da is not half-pleased with whoever took what's his own.” The Irish accent comes through on top of the American sometimes. Maybe that's what fooled me back a few years ago. Red hair, green eyes, style, smarts, that shamrock lilt to her voice. Think of it as camouflage.
She does the chin thing again, and Mary hurries over with a white ceramic bowl filled nearly up with water. I let out a sigh because I want Erin to know I'm not happy, but I’ll play ball. Or rather, I'll play swami. It's a thing I picked up in the desert chasing Rommel around the sand dunes with Patton’s 1st. I won't tell that story here. Frankly, I don’t like to think about it.
Erin slides the bowl between us.
I give her a look. She rolls her eyes and slips a twenty under the bowl. Now she's just another client.
“You have something?” I ask. She knows the routine. Opens her purse and pulls out a pack of Salems. Really? Smuggling cigarettes? Thought her father was into much more interesting things. Not your common smuggler. Erin smirks and opens the the pack. I flick a light. She takes a drag. Reaches back in the purse, brings out a crystal. At least, I think that's what it is. A rock at least. With rock stuff and crystal stuff, lots of purple, lots of sharp edges. About the size of my coffee cup. Okay. This'll be more interesting.
I set the rock into the middle of the bowl.
Trick of the light, I tell people. Just a trick of the light. Rock is taller than the bowl, but it drifts to the bottom, getting smaller and smaller. One time, I set a twenty pound bowling ball into the water. Looked like it dropped down a well and sat like a little marble at the bottom. So yeah, it's a thing I learned to do.
Then there’s something about the coffee here at the Little Castle. I tip a bit onto the water, and it swirls slowly around and around. I guide it a bit, poking it with whatever this is I do. Move it around until it feels right.
Water clears, and Erin tugs her collar against the cold that always comes with this. Leans in over the bowl. Talks low. “Did you think we wouldn’t know, Bart?” she says. “Did you think you were putting something over on us?”
The water starts to shine with little lights. Ripples with a breeze in the stale air of the diner. I’m looking for a certain pair of eyes to hijack. Someone who was there and saw the theft.
“Paddy saw you. And he told Da, and Da told me. I said I'd mention it to you. Ask what you might have been thinking to take something of Da's.”
Paddy Donoho. Rode a desk stateside, while I was sucking sand. Greedy. Hits women. But he’s one of their tribe, and I'm not. Fine.
I look for his eyes in the water. He’ll get a headache from this liked he'd been on a week long leave in Cairo without the fun and never know why. Just the way this works.
There he is. Behind a crate in a warehouse, looking at other crates. I grab onto him, and we’re seeing things from where he’s crouching. I move a bit so the water's easier for Erin to see. She shivers. Magic - or whatever this is - makes all kinds of people nervous. General Patton never did get used to what I could do.
A voice rises up from the bowl. Donoho whispering to someone but not looking at him. “There’s hundreds of the things. The old man’ll never miss just a few.” We see the crate get bigger as Donoho comes out of hiding and goes at it with a crow bar.
What a putz. Telling them it was me. But he doesn't know about my bowl and almost dying in the desert, which we’re not talking about here.
I pocket the twenty. Erin sits back, maybe a little embarrassed. “Huh,” she says. “I thought you’d…” gets more embarrassed.
I laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself.” Gets her mad again, which is what she likes. Like a car that runs hot even in neutral.
She reaches reaches for the purple crystal-whatever-it-is at the bottom of the bowl. She fiddles around, comes up empty. Looks at me, green eyes lit with a promise of trouble.
“We have a problem, Bart?”
“What are they?” I ask. Count them. That's ten words I've given her since she walked into the Little Castle. It's a game: Can I keep it under twenty. Go over twenty with her, things always go wrong.
“You don’t need to know.”
It's too tempting. Three more words, because it makes me feel good. “You don't know.”
“Well, its Da’s business, isn’t it?” She stubs out her cigarette right on the table top. “Give it over, Barty.”
“He doesn't know you took it.” Six more, and that's my limit.
Now she’s really mad. Because it's true. She took the stone, knowing I could use it, probably knowing I hadn’t done what they figured I'd done, but thinking, maybe he’s still mad at me, maybe he still likes me. But it wasn’t her that broke it off between us. Just how it went. We were starting to be a bad habit. The yelling, mixed in with the sex, the whole thing. Don't miss it, do I?
I pour all the water from the bowl into my empty coffee cup. It's bone dry, and no purple stone. I look into those green eyes; give back her glare as good as she gives it.
“Bastard,” she spits, and shoves out of the booth. The paper napkins are stuck to her coat, and she growls as she peels them off, crumples them up and throws them at me. Door slams, bell jingles, plate glass shakes.
I wait until the headlights veer away. Pull out the purple stone from under the table. Figure I'll mail this one back to her father. Don't need any trouble with the old man. After I figure out what the things do.
Check my pocket for change. Put some down for Mary. Keep a dime for the phone. Erin's number's in my wallet, but I remember it fine. Guess I needed to balance things a bit.
The air outside is clean, so wet it keeps the desert far, far away.
