Spygirl (7 page)

“He's got strep throat.” This came from Linus. “Strep, huh?” Sol cleared his throat before commanding to the back of the office, “Gus, uh, when you get a chance, can you make out with Amy?” I started laughing. Linus chuckled with his hand over his mouth, pointing to me and Gus and saying, “Oh shit, he got you guys! Oh shit!” Linus had a Ph.D. in philosophy and a copy of Immanuel Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
on his desk, along with an Elvis Costello boxed set and a small heart-framed photo of Wynona Judd, “The
queen
of country.” He was a recovering Ritalin kid and wore horn-rimmed glasses with the corners duct-taped, because, he told anyone who would listen, he didn't make the ducats at the Agency to get those special screws to fix them.

I had brought in some candy canes that morning I had left over from Christmas. They were a pacifier, an oral fix, a substitute for cigarettes (which cause cancer), pens (which I usually chew till my mouth is blue), or my fingernails (which I bite). Sol noticed me putting them in the middle of the conference table.

“That's funny, I didn't know you were a goy A. Gray,” he remarked. I explained that I'm not, I'm actually 100 percent Jewish, but for like the last six generations, my all Jewish relatives have
celebrated Christmas. “My parents are from California,” I said to Sol's dubious stare. “Jews on the West Coast are different,” I told him.

“So you're not Jewish. You're not Jewish. I mean your name is Gray—what, was it Amy Graystein? ” George started laughing from his desk. “Okay, here's a Jewish trivia question. What's the most solemn day of the year?”

I looked at him gravely. “Your mom's birthday.” George started clapping, and Evan and Wendy and Linus giggled in the background.

“Nice one, Graystein.” He was smiling and his face reddened. “You know what you are? You're a Hide-a-Jew—one of those Jews who tries to ‘pass.’ ” He picked up a candy cane and bit off the tip of the hook. “But you gotta decide: You can't take off Christmas and Rosh Hashanah. Company policy. Take your time—you've got a whole year to decide.”

I was holding my breath until I thought it was safe to sneak out for a cigarette break. It turned out we could only smoke in the office when our accountant, Adrienne, wasn't there. The smoke irritated her alveoli. We investigators hated her damn alveoli. When I saw Evan and Linus sneak out at twenty-three past ten, I figured they knew what flew and quietly walked out to the fire escape.

“Amus Graymus,” Evan said, when I stepped out onto the frigid platform. “Hi, guys,” I said. I suddenly felt like crying. I shifted around and sucked down three ciggies while they carried on a debate about why Superman was vulnerable to Kryptonite.

When they left, I sat on the ascending stairs and tears welled up. I took a deeper breath and they came out harder. Now I looked like shit, and I'd have to stay out in the cold until my face wasn't
red and patchy. Just then the fire door creaked open and Big Gus stepped out onto the platform.

“A. Gray, how ya doin’,” he said with his subtle New York twang. He'd grown up in Texas, actually, but liked sounding like he was from Brooklyn, since now he was. He also was a former dog-catcher and zookeeper who proudly wore a four-inch scar on his right shin, an homage to his favorite client, a mountain lion named Betty. Gus was a hoarder of pop-culture factoids, a repository for every line in every movie or TV show ever made by Dennis Leary Burt Reynolds, and the entire cast of
M*A*S*H.
I found him a little intimidating, a cross between a hulking biker and a savant, sandy-haired farmboy He was also one of the many of my new colleagues who seemed suspicious of me hitching my wagon with Nestor and Assman, although he was superficially friendly. I wasn't sure what he thought of me. Maybe he didn't.

“Okay,” I squeaked. I was staring at the wrought-iron bars underneath me, giving way to tiers of smaller and smaller platforms below. My cigarette fell out of my hand as I went to wipe my lashes clean, and fluttered through the metal to the ground beneath. It was dizzying.

“Hey, are you cryin’?” He looked closer at me now, and I turned away.

“Nope,” I lied, not able to open my mouth, with my hands over my eyes.

“Is it that guy you broke up with?” I wasn't looking at him, but there was a tenderness in his voice that was soothing.

“Uh-huh.” If I opened my mouth I'd start bawling.

“Ya know, if that guys treats you bad, then fuck him. I think you're really cool. You don't need that jerk—fuck him!”

“Thanks.”

He patted me on the back. “Do you want me to beat the shit out of him?”

“Ha!” I laughed, with visions of Elliott encircled by a gang of Big Gus and Big Gus lookalikes, frail and shaking, all the masculinity in him drained out. I imagined him being tossed like a discarded penny, bouncing through the cracks of the fire escape grates like my cigarette. “That's okay,” I said. “Thanks, though.”

“No problem. Anytime you need me to—” He took his right fist and slammed into his left hand, indicating a considerable ass-whupping. “You just let me know.”

I looked up gratefully, for the first time. Big Gus nodded with his bandanaed head and patted me on mine.

“Thanks, Gus.”

Before I went back into the office I lit another cigarette and rearranged my face. I surveyed the jigsaw of open sky cut by the backsides and alleyways of the buildings around ours. Concentrating on the white firmament above, I tried carefully not to look down to the graveyard of abandoned butts and injured dreams below.

SEVEN             

When I got back to my desk after a round of high-fives, my voicemail light was flashing, and I felt an unexpected surge of satisfaction. My heart fluttered and I was dizzy. If it's Elliott, that little bastard, I'm not even gonna call him back, I said to myself. I'll be my own valentine. I'll buy myself that Rebecca Taylor peasant blouse from Intermix, the store around the block from my office that had singularly caused my financial ruin. There was the devil inside that store that hid in my gorged credit cards and compelled me to rack up finance charges and late fees. For someone in the business of checking other people's credit, I was uniquely
sympathetic to my subjects. Or maybe I'd just have a new Valentine. February 14 was only two weeks away.

Imagine my chagrin when I realized the message was not my newly jettisoned ex-boyfriend, Elliott, but Luke, a wiry neighborhood guy I had met at a Cobble Hill street fair months before. He had a job with the city, and we had talked about zoning laws and Pavement a lot—the band and the hard stuff. He also called everybody “jokers,” such as, “That joker's really got to get his act together,” or, “What, you mean that joker?” He had the sluggish inflection of a skate bum, the kind of guy who said “stoked,” and he wasn't even from Seattle. He grew up in Brooklyn.

He invited me to see a band that night, and, owing to a combination of flattery, and vindictiveness toward Elliott for not having called in the last three days, I agreed to meet him for dinner and to see his friend's band, the Whiskey Whores. After sushi, we headed to Brownie's in the East Village and I slumped into a banquette near the stage, sipping my traditional G&T and sucking down Tarey-tons. Luke was making the rounds, high-fiving his friends, and I wasn't in the mood for schmoozing.

The first set was a trio jug band, Poncho's Luck, which performed a fifty-minute instrumental homage to Willie Nelson. They were actually good. The second consisted of four fairly straight-laced frat-boy washouts doing an agonizing Hootie-style jam, but with a mildly cute bassist. I kept my eye on him. In the middle of one song, “You're Killing Me,” there was a long falsetto part, and I could have sworn the cute bassist was looking at me as he sang,
You slip into my life, and then slip out, No more road to travel, I kick your memory into gravel, and wash it away.
Pretty romantic.

Later, in between their set and the Whiskey Whores, I am in line for the bathroom when Cute Bassist walks by. “Hey,” he says, putting his cigarette in his mouth to offer a handshake, “I'm Ethan.”
Ethan and I talk for a while, but Luke's not far away and I'm feeling uncomfortable neglecting him, so I'm about to graciously extricate myself from the conversation—while still getting his number—when another guy walks up behind him, puts his arm around Ethan, and introduces himself as Markus, the drummer in the band. But the thing is, it's not just that he's not just a guy in a band, he's Dot-Com Guy, the grand prize in Sol's Jack Daniel's challenge.

Adrenaline pumping, I see my chance for glory and I seize it. These are the moments investigators must live for. Copping a swig from Ethan's Miller Lite (one must make do in dire circumstances), my morph into hyper-PI-mode is complete. I chat him up, and he gives me his number. The amazing thing is this: I stay cool, and say something to Ethan about how I have a friend in town that night and can't chat for long and he seems to buy it. “What's Markus's deal, anyway?” I ask him, holding my breath. “He's a friend of mine from the University of Tennessee,” he says (Markus had claimed he went to Yale). I ask him what Markus does; Ethan says Markus made a lot of money from some “online outfit” he set up with his father's money, but that the two of them are planning to open a bar in the Caymans—“With a bowling theme—you know, bowling shirts, roller-girl waitresses.” I'm horrified, but outwardly rapt. Such are the perils of the investigator's work today where kids are playing with grownup sums of money and the PR machine keeps financing in the fold long enough for fly-by-night investors to make a nice return, take the money and run. Just call me Madam Magnum, baby.

The next day and four phone calls later, I was on the line with the first of several financiers Markus and company had pursued for investments in their Bowlarama Bar. I was told on condition of anonymity that Dot-Com Guy, who one source referred to as “That little rat bastard,” has $250,000 of his investors’ money that was
supposed to have been funneled into a Skee Ball manufacturing company in East Asia. I got the whole thing on tape, thankfully, and handed it over to Sol, demanding my prize. “What's this?” he demanded. I told him the story, which he got a kick out of, even calling George over to take it all in. Only next time, he promised me, he wouldn't let me off so easy. An anonymous source was okay, but it wouldn't break the case. Keep looking.

At my desk later that day I got a phone call from my best friend, Cassie, inviting me to an Alphabet City bar called Niagara, where we're semiregulars of the largely nonalcoholic but shamelessly freeloading type. I took her up on it.

Cassie, like so many of my friends, worked for a website as a “content producer.” She wrote columns like “Ten Ways to Make a Good Marriage Great,” even though she was single, and she had somehow recently started doing a home advice column, counseling people how to remove vomit stains from sisal rugs and how to keep deer out of their garages, even though her apartment was smaller than most garages. Still, Cassie remained an optimist, as demonstrated by her belief that every new night spent at Niagara was full of possibility, despite hundreds of nights that indicated otherwise.

Making plans to go to Niagara was always a ritual of practiced futility, because we inevitably ended up there, although we always went through the motions of exploring other options. Cassie would ask me if I wanted to do something. I'd say, “Sure.” Cassie would ask what I want to do. I'd say “How about … this place or how about … that place,” and she'd respond, “No, it's too—” (fill in one of the following) “far away,” “crowded,” “rank-smelling,”
“lame,” “full of ugly boys,” and so on. Then, after a moment of exasperated silence, I—or she—would say, “Well, how about Niagara?”

On this night, however, she just said, “So you wanna go to Niagara?” upfront and I said, “Sure,” and that was that. I told her about breaking up with Elliott. She'd been in L.A. visiting a sort-of-ex-boyfriend, so she wasn't up to speed yet.

“I'm sorry, but I always thought that guy was dis-
gust
-ing.” I knew Cassie didn't think much of him, but I was a little offended by her candor. I could have used a little sympathy.

“Listen,” Cassie said, “You are so out of his league it's ridiculous. He should be begging you to come back, and you shouldn't even be acknowledging his existence.”

“I shouldn't?”

“No.” She was resolute. “Now let's go flirt with some bartenders.”

I felt buoyed by her conviction. Cassie was the only friend from high school that I was still close to. Our nights out in New York together so often felt like replays of so many replays of high school: the two of us cutting class (or work), passing notes, and committing other acts of rebellion both small and big, even if there weren't parents or other adults around to affront. Cassie taught me to smoke my first cigarette in the parking lot behind a Friendly's ice cream store. First she had me practice inhaling with a piece of strawberry licorice. “Just fill your mouth with the smoke. Nope, don't breathe it in directly, just like you're filling your mouth with air, not breathing it. Right. And then remove the licorice and now inhale. Good. Now try it again.” She was a learned and precise educator. Later, behind the steamy overlit Friendly's Dumpster, I lit the real thing and I didn't cough or choke once, which was my greatest fear.