Snitch World (7 page)

Klinger figured it was at least half Frankie’s paper. “Want to see?”

“See what?”

“The paper. The news. What’s going on. Iraq and shit.” Frankie smiled and shook his head. “You are a fucking trip.”

By way of laboring up and out of the Tenderloin, they mounted the southwestern flank of Nob Hill. There, at the intersection of Pine and Hyde, Frankie showed Klinger a corner café and told him it was a place that catered to
hospital staff. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the lobby of St. Francis Memorial, right across Hyde Street. “I gotta date.” Frankie gestured vaguely, against the traffic on Pine Street, toward the crown of Nob Hill. “Up the hill.” He patted Klinger’s shoulder. “No matter what happens, keep the faith, I’ll be back. Shortly thereafter, you will experience a payday.”

“I’m not sure my system can handle the shock,” Klinger said truthfully.

“You got plenty of dough for this place,” Klinger assured him. “Enjoy your breakfast. And hey,” he flicked his fingertips at the shoulder. “Enjoy your lunch, too.”

Klinger frowned. “How much time we talking, here?”

“What,” Frankie asked. “You in a rush?”

Klinger lifted a shoulder. “No, I …”

Frankie raised his hand and, like magic, a green taxi glided silently to the curb. “Gotta keep up appearances,” Frankie winked.

Frankie ducked into the back seat of the taxi, closed the door, and the machine glided soundlessly away. Clean Air Vehicle, it said on the cab’s trunk, and Gentleman’s Club. A block back down Hyde at Bush, which is one-way going east, the taxi forged a left through a crosswalk full of wheel-chairs and crutches and disappeared.

Breakfast and lunch on the same day, Klinger marveled, as he contemplated the front door of the café.

Two and a half hours later, Klinger was holding at arm’s length the full-page ad for an unputdownable thriller on the back of the Arts section when Frankie slid into the booth opposite him.

“I was just wondering,” Klinger said, as he refolded the section and dropped it onto the stack beside his perfectly polished plate, “how long it’s been since I read two articles in a row on the subject of narrative ballet.”

“Yeah …” Frankie managed to respond. Despite the word’s containing no fricatives, in Frankie’s mouth it sounded like slurry running down the chute behind a cement truck. His lower lip hung a bit slack, and he appeared even more relaxed than the last time Klinger had seen him.

Even though the
Times
had fired up aggressive West Coast coverage of late, Klinger had found no mention in it of a San Francisco convenience store clerk getting his head bashed in by ten pounds of frozen chicken. Either way, he saw no reason to mention it to Frankie.

“Everything come out okay up the hill?”

“Beautiful …”

A waitress appeared with a pot of coffee and asked Frankie if he wanted anything.

“I’m …” Frankie managed to say, “I’m good …”

She indicated Klinger’s cup. Klinger shrugged. As she poured the refill she asked, “Ever heard of a poet called Jim Gustafson?”

Frankie didn’t bother to answer that one, but she wasn’t talking to Frankie.

“Can’t say as I have,” Klinger responded politely.

The waitress parked the knuckles of her spare hand on her hip. “The night he read the line to a thousand people in the Exploratorium, about sitting in Malvina’s and drinking coffee till your hands shake like the wings on cheap jets?” She smiled and nodded. “I took him back to my place and fucked him till he puked.”

This got even Frankie’s attention. “
Yeah
…”

“Didn’t take long,” she added.

“I remember Malvina’s,” Klinger said. “Over there in North Beach. Next to Washington Square.”

“Jim was talking about the old Malvina’s,” the waitress told him. “On Union at Grant. Before it moved to Washington Square.”

“Is it still there?”

“Beats me,” she said. “I live in Bernal Heights.”

“What about the poet guy?”

“Deader than a letter to Santa,” she said. “The sauce got him.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“We had our fun.” She gathered up Klinger’s empty plate with her free hand. “Then I threw him out. Anything else?”

Frankie looked as if he were about to manage a shrug, but the gesture eluded him.

“I think that’s it,” Klinger told her. “Let’s have a check.”

“You got it.”

Klinger watched her walk away.

“Yeah …” Frankie’s eyes were barely open, and he smacked his lips once in a while, ever so slightly.

Klinger folded his hands on the Formica and waited. Not two minutes later, the check came. The total was $9.87, in return for which Klinger had more food in his belly than any day in recent memory. Plus, he’d been taking up real estate for two and a half hours. He laid a ten and two ones on the tray. “Keep it.” Eleven dollars and sixty-nine cents entered the ruled ledger of his mind.

“Appreciate it,” the waitress said. If she noticed that Klinger’s table-mate was on the nod, she made not a sign. Instead, once more, she showed Klinger the coffee pot. Klinger lifted both hands off the laminate and made them flutter. The waitress smiled and went away with the coffee and twelve bucks.

After fiddling with his cup for a few minutes Klinger got bored watching his host convincingly imitate a man catching forty winks in Business First. Plus, Klinger’s ass was getting sore from abusing the Naugahyde. Not to get uppity, for he was as simultaneously sated and warm as he’d
been in weeks, if not months. Finally, he asked Frankie how long he’d been out.

Frankie frowned slightly. “About two weeks,” he said, not bothering to open his eyes.

Klinger kept his voice down. “How the hell did you get a habit going in two weeks?”

Frankie smiled vaguely. “Who said I ever lost it?”

Oh, Klinger reminded himself, of course.

“Besides,” Frankie added, allowing the hint of a frown to flit across his brow, “do I look like I gotta habit?”

For the first time in weeks, Klinger laughed without rancor.

Frankie opened his eyes a little wider. “Lemme tell you something about a habit.”

Klinger made no response. He was going to hear about it whether he wanted to or not.

“As a musician once told me,” Frankie said, “any time you see a sixteenth note? Or a whole row of them? And you gotta habit?” Frankie sailed the flat of his hand over the table. “Every one of them sixteenth notes looks like a half note.”

“A half note,” Klinger repeated.

“And you,” Frankie said, “got allllll day,” he floated the hand back over the table, “to play every one of them just right.”

“That’s …” Klinger pursed his lips, “persuasive.”

Even with the shades between them, Klinger could see Frankie’s eyelids flutter. It reminded him of the reflection of the revolving blades of a ceiling fan on the surface of his drink just … Was that yesterday?

“But,” Klinger said, “you’re not a musician.”

“But,” Frankie said, raising an admonitory if languid forefinger, “I am an artist.”

“Ah ha,” Klinger said. “I’d forgotten.”

“Pay attention,” Frankie suggested. Once again his hand sailed over the Formica, toward the window and beyond where a dog, as Klinger now noticed, crouched to defecate on the sidewalk, as its mistress patiently watched.

“I regard the teeming boulevard …” Frankie stopped. After a moment he said, “Where was I?”

“The teeming boulevard,” Klinger prompted him. “You are an artist.”

Again Frankie sailed the hand over the Formica. “… To and fro march the marks …” Frankie smiled. “Each and every one a half note.”

“And you got allllll day,” Klinger smiled, “to play them just right.”

“Not all of them. By no means all of them.” Frankie redeployed the forefinger. “Just the one. The exact right one.”

“You’re an artist,” Klinger had to agree.

Frankie did not dissemble.

Klinger sat back against his side of the booth and fingered his cup of coffee. If Frankie noticed a pause, awkward or otherwise, he manifested no sign. I’m sick of drinking coffee, Klinger thought to himself, that’s for sure. He glanced up. The clock on the wall above the entry door told him it was one-fifteen. This clock, too, had Chinese numerals. What the hell’s with the Chinese numerals? A notice posted beside the clock announced opening time at six a.m. and closing time at two p.m. A notice posted on the other side of the clock announced the San Francisco Minimum Wage as $9.79 per hour.

Klinger’s eyes fell until they found the waitress, who was behind the sit-down counter making a fresh pot of coffee.

“I’ll bet you’re thirsty,” Frankie announced, as if reading Klinger’s mind.

“Yes,” Klinger admitted. “I’m about as caffeinated as I can stand.” He lay the flat of his palm on the lower-left corner of his stomach. Though masked by satiety, the twinge lurked. “It’s time to take the edge off.”

“Let’s go,” Frankie said, without betraying the impulse to act on his own suggestion.

Klinger got to his feet.

“We’ll take a cab to North Beach,” Frankie said, still not getting up, his eyes slits. “Get you something to drink.”

“Talk about your perfectly executed half notes,” Klinger said. “But it seems fair to mention that I’m just about tapped.”

Frankie opened his hand over the Formica, and a twenty-dollar bill, folded twice, fell out of it. “Be my guest.” Klinger marveled at the twenty. Frankie stood out of the booth. “Taxi and drinks, on me.”

Klinger shook his head. “Two weeks?”

No comment accompanied Frankie’s fey gesture. Gaining the sidewalk, Frankie said, “Jesus Christ,” and reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket.

“You already got them on,” Klinger told him.

Frankie touched the hinge of his sunglasses with the other hand. “Oh.”

The dog was tied to the parking meter nearest the corner. Seeing Klinger, it stood up and wagged its tail. Klinger offered him the backs of his fingertips. The dog licked them with barely a sniff, redoubling the oscillations of its tail. Klinger ruffled its ears. “Somebody’s glad to see me.”

“A little doggie every day,” its owner said, as she dropped a bag of waste into a trash can beyond the parking meter, “is all a body needs.”

“Yeah,” Klinger murmured, as a taxi magically pulled to the curb. With not so much as a backwards glance at the
woman or her dog, Frankie opened the curbside door and slid across the back seat. “Broadway and Columbus,” he told the cabbie. “C’mon, man,” he said to the open door.

“What’s his name?” Klinger asked the owner.

“Douglas Englebart, Jr.,” she told him.

“The—.” Klinger frowned. “Who?”

“He’s named for Douglas Englebart.”

The dog sat down and looked expectantly up at his mistress. “I don’t—,” Klinger began.

“Sure you do.” The woman fed the dog a biscuit. “He invented the mouse.”

“The mouse?” Klinger repeated stupidly.

Frankie was chuckling, but at or with what or whom, it would have been difficult to say.

The woman made a squeezing motion with her free hand. “Point and click? Englebart,” she laughed, “can you point and click?” The dog wagged its tail.

“Englebart,” Klinger told the dog. The dog looked at Klinger. “I’ll see you later.” The dog turned its head. “Won’t I see you later?” The dog furrowed its brow and turned its head the other way.

“He’s hip to the interrogative tone,” the woman said, “but he has no idea what you’re asking.”

Klinger nodded thoughtfully.

“Let’s go!” Frankie said.

“The problem with this app,” said the voice in the phone, “is that its memory footprint imposes conflicts in cache. Period.”

Phone clasped to his right ear, Phillip Wong twirled fettuccine onto the fork in his left hand, its tines held against the curvature of the spoon in his right hand. “You’re blaming my app for an out-of-date hardware fault,” he protested. “That shit flies on the dual core.” He filled his mouth with
pasta puttanesca
.

In the audio background, Enrico Caruso was shedding a fugitive tear. “Phil Phil Phil,” the phone chided. “Do you have any idea of the ratio of dual-core owners versus every other goddamn phone on the market?”

“That’s not my problem, Marci.” Phillip dropped the spoon, took the phone to hand and glanced at the screen. At that moment, for some reason, he recalled a hod carrier he’d noticed on a construction site a couple of weeks back, stacking cinderblocks with a phone clenched between ear and shoulder. They’ll have to build a special coffin for that guy, Phillip had thought at the time, with a dogleg toward the top. If I couldn’t afford out-call shiatsu, I’d be courting a similar fate. He reparked the phone on his opposite shoulder and took up the fork. “Besides, it’s nine fucking thirty. Can’t this wait till tomorrow?”

“In two and a half hours, Phillip,” Marci pointed out, “it will be tomorrow.”

“Fuck, Marci,” Phillip whined, “this is the first hot meal
I’ve had in, in …” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a hot meal. He inserted a figure anyway. “… Two weeks.”

“Show me where it says you are allowed hot meals,” Marci said.

Phillip failed to dignify this quip with a laugh or an answer.

“More to the point,” Marci continued, “does your hotass phone have a debugger and a compiler?”

Phillip dropped the fork, downed the second half of his Sangiovese, and waved the empty glass at the wait-staff. “No,” Phillip told the phone, “but it did steer me to an empty table in a North Beach Italian restaurant on a Thursday night.”

“That’s a good app,” Marci pointed out. “Too bad you didn’t write it.”

Not for nothing, Phillip cursed to himself, did somebody make this chick Vice President of Compliance. “True,” he managed to retort despite a mouthful of pasta. “I use it every time I’m allowed to eat off-site.”

His phone groaned. “What’s that?”

“I just sent you a pdf of a monograph on software architectures for real-time caching—nonconflicting real-time caching. It’s a little theoretical and there’s some math, but you can probably apply its wisdom to a patch for your code in time for a demo on Sunday morning.”

“Sunday morning?” Phillip nearly screamed. The waiter appeared with the bottle and poured Phillip’s glass half full. Phillip gestured. The waiter frowned. Phillip gestured again. Without missing a beat, the waiter retrieved a second glass from a setup on the adjacent table, filled that one half full, inclined his head slightly, and went away. Phillip downed half the first half-glass. “Sunday morning …” he repeated, a little more calmly.