Dead at Breakfast (4 page)

“Intelligence, I imagine.”

“Paul was a spook? You told me he sold irrigation equipment!”

“He told
me
he was retired.”

“From selling irrigation equipment?”

“Irrigation equipment in the Middle East, yes.”

Hope looked at Maggie with narrowed eyes. “I can't believe you never told me this.”

The elevator door opened and released them onto their floor. “Well,” said Maggie, “the retirement part may have been an exaggeration.” They reached their bedroom doors, found their key cards, and wished each other a good night.

A
lexander Antippas was
sitting
in an Adirondack chair in the weak October sun, reading yesterday's newspaper. The lawn sloped down to Long Lake, where colorful kayaks and dark green canoes were laid out on the edge of the beach. In the flower beds, chrysanthemums glowed orange and rust, and leggy joe-pye weed waved pale purple heads in the morning light.

Up near the kitchen there were herb and vegetable gardens, still producing late tomatoes, many colored peppers, and neat rows of chard and spinach and kale. There were silvery sage and bushy basil plants, and spindly cilantro and dill trying to bolt. He'd been monitoring them when the Cooking People weren't swarming. Food interested him.

He'd had a wife with a green thumb once. She had taught him all the American names for these plants, and he loved the dark, bitter greens of autumn especially. In the Peloponnese, in his boyhood, he had tended goats from a stone house above a village of almost unimaginable poverty when considered from where he sat now. Bare stone houses cut into the sides of slopes so steep that they seemed nearly vertical, scarcely reachable except by footpaths, and never entirely safe from rock slides from above or the danger that the track beneath your feet would crumble and send you hurtling thousands of feet down the gorge. They had kept chickens and grown garlic
and onions. His mother was dead, had always been dead, but when he was little his aunt had made goat cheese. She taught him and his sister to gather wild chervil and greens that resembled spinach, and she would trade eggs for dried cranberry beans and olive oil down in the hamlet. When his sister died and his aunt left for Athens and there were no more women in the house, the diet was bleak and unvaried, designed for subsistence rather than pleasure. Ever since, food had meant more to him than it seemed to mean to other people.

His wife's dog was attached to the leg of his chair by a leash. In Greece dogs didn't live inside. They didn't really belong to anyone, though children were indulged if they wanted to feed and play with them. One grew accustomed to the keening of dogs on the hills outside at night, hungry or cold or just bored. You lived with it, unless you decided not to, and then the dog in question disappeared. In the cities now, with rich tourists so important to the economy, the state had grown either sentimental or pragmatic about dogs. They still lived outdoors but they had addresses on their state-issued collars, and were regularly picked up, taken to the vet or who knows what, maybe to the dog shampoo parlor, then returned to the street where they spent their days. There was a surprisingly fat and contented-looking mutt lolling outside the Grande Bretagne the last time they'd been in Athens. It amused him to see The Wife sweep into the grand lobby with Colette on her rhinestone leash, while the placid unkempt street dog lay outside in the sun, paying so little attention you could doubt they belonged to the same species. If you stayed at the very best hotels, they understood people who thought their dogs belonged inside. Otherwise it was a problem. Like here.

Alex had reached the part of the paper that concerned itself with the private lives of public idiots, which today, oh surprise, was in a busybody ecstasy over the spectacle calling herself Artemis.

Artemis. That child knew as much about Greek mythology as
this poodle. Here she was, doing a perp walk into the Brentwood police station, having crashed her Jaguar at three in the afternoon on the way to a rehearsal for her latest “comeback” tour. She'd been released from her third court-ordered stint at Betty Ford ten days ago.

Comeback tour. What the hell had she done to her hair, it looked as if it had been boiled and left to mat, like felt. Who were these geniuses who thought she was actually going to be able to lose fifteen pounds and stay off drugs long enough to remember the words to her songs, and prance around onstage in her little spangled hooker costumes in city after city, and sing the way she sang these days, that sounded as if she was shredding the inside of her larynx? Without blowing her pipes out, if nothing worse? Twerking, would that be next? She made him physically ill.

Look at that hair. When she was three she'd had the hair of a Botticelli Venus. If she were right in front of him, he'd hold her down and shave her head, let her spend a few months looking like a hairless monkey, maybe she'd learn to respect the gifts she'd been given.

He turned to the Sudoku. At his feet the dog had gotten up and was wandering around, incapable, apparently, of realizing that it was tethered. It seemed to smell something interesting. He shifted his bulk, put down the paper, and turned his attention to the scene before him again. There was a lone catboat out on the lake, skimming lazily across the path of the sun. A herd of fat white clouds, drifting like great “
îsles flottantes
” on that marvelous nursery dessert, were breaking up the sheen of light on the water. And over on the other side of the perennial bed, there was now a figure moving.

It was crawling along the edge of the bed on all fours, stopping to work at the stalks of things to strip away crisp and curling leaves, to pinch or behead the spent flowers. Putting on his sunglasses to cut the glare, Alex could see that the figure was a small, slender man, not a boy as he'd thought at first. A slight old man in a very
old flannel shirt, towing a large rubber bucket behind him, into which he threw his cuttings. Alex thought of bonfires of the cuttings from grapevines and olive trees in his childhood, how the stinging smoke scented the air and your hair and clothes and made your eyes feel burned. He'd love the times of year that he went with the others to work on the rich farm down the slope that belonged to people from Argos. When he first grew rich he took The Wife and daughter, who was still called Jenny, back to Greece to see where he'd come from. But when he got to Argos, it looked like a grubby market town, not the glowing metropolis he'd thought to startle with his newfound glory, and when they reached his home village, he didn't even stop to look for the “rich” farm. Instead he pointed out a substantial house in Stemnitsa as they drove through without stopping and afterward The Wife enjoyed telling people she'd seen where he grew up and it was an absolute hovel.

The fleshless little man was standing on the near side of the flower bed now, frankly watching him. His version of erect was painful to see; there had been a man on the rich farm who'd misunderstood the fancy farm machinery and had an accident that left him much like that. Something bad had happened to this one, anyway.

“That's the dog,” said the bent figure, looking at Colette.

“It's certainly
a
dog,” said Alex. He was admiring himself as if watching this scene from one of the floating cloud islands, the prosperous man of affairs making time to be civil to a rude mechanical, who would never guess that he had once been such a one himself.

“That's the dog upset my Walter,” said the man. His tone was surprisingly aggressive, for a menial addressing a guest.

Alex looked at the poodle. She was lolling in the grass, now that the figure had approached and been accepted, and as if she knew they were speaking of her, she rolled onto her back with all four paws in the air and her bottom teeth just showing, her ears lying open and pink on the grass like hair bows.

“And you are?” said Alex pleasantly.

“Earl.”

“And how did the dog upset Walter?”

“Yaps.”

“Ah. Well, I don't doubt that,” said Alex. “Fortunately my room is too far away for me to hear her.” He picked up his newspaper.

“Shouldn't be left alone in the room,” said Earl.

“And you see, she hasn't been. She's out here with me. Please tell Walter I'm sorry he was inconvenienced.” As an afterthought, he reached into his pocket and peeled a twenty off a roll of bills. “Please give this to Walter and tell him to buy himself a drink. If he's old enough to drink.” Maybe this person was supporting a grandson.

“He's eighty-seven,” said Earl. He did not take the money. Mr. Antippas looked at him, decided he must be a little deranged, and put the bill back in his pocket. Then he hoisted himself out of his chair and towered over Earl, just to make the point that he was not, in case his good manners had deceived this troll, someone who could be toyed with. Then he unhooked Colette's leash and said to Earl, “I see you're busy.” He walked back toward the hotel, let himself in the side door to the wing he thought of as the Animal House, ascended to the room shared by The Wife and her sister, and tossed the dog in. The door locked behind him, and as he went down the stairs, he heard Colette take up her howls of complaint.

Cherry Weaver was in the kitchen, sitting on a stool near the salad prep, eating a curried turkey wrap and sobbing. It was not an attractive sight. Her mother was elbow-deep in steaming sudsy water, cleaning the stockpots.

“It wasn't my fault,” she said, “and he was like he knew that but he could only keep me until the end of the month. So I could make my plans.”

Her mother turned around to look at her daughter, now sporting oily dressing on the skirt of her moss-colored Oquossoc Mountain Inn uniform. Mrs. Weaver snapped a paper towel off the nearest roll, and handed it to Cherry. “Blow your nose,” she said and turned back to her work. It was nearly impossible to cry and eat at the same time and keep your mouth closed while doing it, and Beryl Weaver didn't really feel she had to see what that looked like. She thought about what a pretty little thing Cherry had been. And very sweet, always the one to make you a ceramic ashtray or bring a handful of candy corn to you from her treat bag at Halloween, in her grubby damp hand. But that had been quite a time ago.

“And he said anyway it had nothing to do with that reservations thing, it just like wasn't working out. But I know it did.”

Mrs. Weaver kept scrubbing. She wished Cherry hadn't grown up to look so much like her father. Her children didn't seem to know the meaning of work, and this one had never had more than a teaspoonful of brains, but she had been biddable. She was going to end up emptying bedpans and wiping wrinkly old behinds over at Ainsley Nursing just like her feckless sister. She'd hoped, she really had, that this one at least wanted to
try
for something you could do in life without wearing rubber gloves.

“Couldn't you ask Chef Sarah to talk to him?” Cherry snuffled, while chewing huge bites, rushing, since technically, her lunch break was over.

Mrs. Weaver turned to look at her.

“So we can both get fired? I like my job, thanks.”

“She'd never fire you for asking.”

“You don't keep good jobs by asking for special favors.”

Mrs. Weaver finished rinsing the big stockpot and reached for a clean kitchen towel. She looked at Cherry, then pointedly up at the wall clock, which stood at two minutes past one. Cherry stuffed the last inch of turkey wrap into her mouth, jumped up and took her
plate to the sink, and hurried out, chewing. Her mother hoped she would stop in the ladies' and fix her smeared eye makeup, but she wasn't going to bet the farm on it.

Sarah, as it happened, had already talked with Gabe about Cherry Weaver. It was the eighth of the month, so she had taken his lunch tray up personally. Gabe proposed to her every month on the eighth, and every month she laughed, but they both knew she enjoyed it. She'd told him the first time that she would never marry again, and she had her reasons. He had told her that
never
was just a word, and that he was persistent. He had no idea how close she had come to accepting him this morning, but instead of answering him immediately, she happened to ask if he had any idea why Cherry Weaver was weeping in her kitchen, and he had dropped his head into his hands.

“I hate firing people,” he said from behind his fingers.

“I was afraid of that,” said Sarah, and gave him a chance to explain why he felt he had to do it. And felt, as she left him, that perhaps it was just as well that the moment had passed. There would be other months, and this was not the best of times.

Maggie and Hope were playing honeymoon bridge in the lounge at the cocktail hour. The Maynards and Bonnie McCue came in together, having just finished Walking Meditation on the lawn in the violet light of sunset. Lisa and Glory and Alexander the Great were nearby, sharing a baked herbed goat cheese Glory had made in the afternoon.

As goat cheese went this was rather good, Alex thought. Too bad The Wife hadn't learned this trick, he loved goat cheese. He put a large mound of it onto a cracker and popped it into his mouth like dropping a letter into a mailbox. It slipped out of sight with barely a movement of the great jowls, as if he had swallowed it whole.

How did he even taste things? Maggie wondered. She watched
Glory recross her long tan legs and flip a lock of silky multihued blond hair over her shoulder. She was wearing a buff-colored suede jacket and a very brief matching skirt (surely it was rather cool for so much bare flesh now that the night chill was coming on). Maggie noticed Alex watching the legs, as if they had been put on earth for his benefit.

The Wife was chattering about the pumpkin polenta gratinée she had made, which they would have for dinner. What, could someone please explain to him, was the point of pumpkins? Great tedious starchy things, he didn't even like the color. And he wished his wife wouldn't wear pants. Glory never did, at least not around him. She knew what a man liked and she liked to see that he got it. Especially in bed, not that he'd had that pleasure lately.

The young moron from the reception desk was coming toward them, oh god, she had food stains on her skirt, carrying a dark red retro telephone, with a dial and a long cord dangling from it like some article of clothing the girl had neglected to tuck in.

“A call for you, Mrs. Antippas,” Cherry Weaver said. She shoved things around on the cocktail table to make room for the phone, then dropped to her hands and knees to plug the line into a jack somewhere behind Glory's chair.