Peril

The woman who slid into the table next to his a few minutes later was in her mid-forties, but some good work had taken off a decade. She wore a dark blue skirt and white satin blouse that was partially covered by a silk scarf, black with small red roses. A gold dragon with large ruby eyes was pinned just above her right breast, wings spread, mouth open, fangs at the ready. He knew that she’d chosen it to signal that beneath the conservative clothes a voluptuous serpent twined. She ordered a brandy Alexander, swirled it with her little finger, sucked at a long, polished nail.

“I’m Evelyn,” she said finally.

He nodded.

“And you are?”

“Whomever you like.”

He’d responded in this way many times before, and so had learned that the woman in question either laughed and asked another question, or with a disgruntled shrug turned back to her drink and her quest, the distant hope that the next guy she approached would have no such obvious quirk.

The one called Evelyn laughed and swirled her drink. “Okay, let me think. Suppose I name you Frank.”

He offered his hand. “Frank,” he said. “A pleasure.”

She laughed again as she took his hand. There was a slight pink stain on her straight white teeth, and this imperfection lightly touched the small, unhardened part of him. In objects, he looked for perfection, but in people, the chipped and the cracked, the all-but-invisible fray at the hem.

“And what do you do . . . Frank?”

“Whatever you say,” he told her.

A carefully tweezed eyebrow drew into a lovely arch. “Really, you won’t tell me what you do?”

“It’s better if you make it up.”

She looked at him distantly, as if unsure if he was what she really wanted, whether what she saw in him offered merely the allure of danger or the real thing.

“Okay, I’ll play along,” she said. “Let’s say you’re some kind of secret agent.”

He leaned forward and looked at her gravely. His whisper was charged with conspiracy. “Our country is in danger, and I desperately need your help.”

She laughed. “I’ll bet you sell insurance. I’ll bet your name’s Harry and you’re from Spokane.”

“I’ll be Harry if you want.”

“No.” She took a sip of the brandy Alexander. “No, I like your story better. Our country is in danger and you desperately need”—she hesitated, then released her final word like a small, wounded bird—“me.”

SARA

She stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, holding tightly to the suitcase. She’d known from the beginning that the moment would come when she would freeze. She’d come to New York with no idea of what to do or where to go. And so there’d have to be a moment when you couldn’t figure out what you were going to do next. That was when you were most vulnerable, most gullible, most willing to take whatever hand reached out to you. Which was what she’d done with Tony, and later hated herself for doing, and would never do again.

A voice inside her head gave the instruction, Just keep moving!

She lifted her hand and hailed a cab.

“Where to?” the driver asked as she settled into the backseat.

“Brooklyn Heights,” she said for no reason other than that she’d sometimes strolled at night on the wide promenade, the radiant gleam of the Manhattan skyline, the great bridge shimmering above the dividing river.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, she glanced out over the harbor, the distant green of Lady Liberty, her torch hefted high. She tried to imagine herself as an immigrant, new to the country, carrying nothing but a single suitcase and some hopeful vision of the future. She labored to find something hopeful too, but her past reached for her like a bony hand thrust up from the ground, and she felt only the dreadful opposite of nostalgia, memory itself a haunted house.

“Anyplace in particular you want to be dropped off?” the driver asked as he turned off the ramp that led to Brooklyn Heights.

“Just near the river.”

The cab came to a halt on Columbia Heights Street. Sara paid the driver and got out and stood, suitcase in hand, facing the river until she recalled a small hotel whose dark little cabaret room she’d once worked.

It was called the Jefferson, and the cabaret room was now just a bar off the lobby. Still, it was a place she knew and so she decided to check in for the night. The man behind the desk asked if she had a reservation. She told him that she hadn’t.

“Very well,” he said a little sadly, as if in recognition that a hotel where a person could just walk in off the street and get a room was a second-rate hotel, and so he must be second-rate too. “The room’s on the fifth floor.” He gave her the key and tapped a brass bell.

A bellhop appeared. He grabbed her suitcase. “This way.”

The bellhop wore a little round cap with a strap beneath the chin, the kind she remembered on bellhops in movies from the forties, and suddenly she felt the sweet, romantic glow of those old films turn sour in her mind. Their promise of a big happy ending was no more than a cruel joke, a Hollywood fantasy in which the ones who hurt you got what they deserved.

EDDIE