Strange Trades (28 page)

Twigg bounded out of bed lithely.

His black pajamas, it was now revealed, were embroidered with hundreds of identical white termites.

“Ah, Paternoster! Well done! On the table if you please!”

The old and crabbed servant—longish hair the shade of old celluloid—set his burden down.

The table was a large piece of gold-rimmed glass borne aloft on the backs of two kneeling naked men arranged parallel. One of the humaniform trestles was a middle-aged paunchy type; the other young and lean.

Twigg moved to an antique desk of normal construction, where a high-end computer incongruously sat. He powered it up, eager to begin his day of bending and shaping, betrayal and coercion. Simultaneously, with seeming unconcern, he questioned his servant.

“Birthday this week, Paternoster? Am I correct?”

“As always, sir.”

“Not thinking of retirement yet, are you?”

A fearful tremor passed over Paternoster’s worn features. “No, sir! Of course not! I served your father for his whole life, and his father before him! How could I even think of
retiring
!”

“Very good!” Twigg ceased his typing. As if pondering a different topic, he said, “I must find a hassock for this room! Well, I’ll get around to it some day.”

The servant seemed on the verge of fainting. “Any—anything else, sir?”

“No, Paternoster, you may go.”

Twigg’s braying laughter escorted Paternoster out.

Whipping the silver cover off the tray, Twigg disclosed his breakfast.

It was a single uncapped bottle of sinisterly effervescent

Zingo, whose label featured the famous lightning-bolt Z.

Twigg grabbed the bottle and downed its bright Cool Mint Listerine-colored contents.

Cell-u-licious!

Setting the empty bottle down, the man picked up a device off the table. It resembled a standard remote-control unit.

Pivoting, Twigg raised the unit and pointed across the vast room.

On the far side of the interior acreage stood a full-sized statue of a Siberian tiger, absolutely lifelike save for its unvarying artificial whiteness. The beast’s face was frozen open in a toothy snarl, every ridge of its pallid gullet delineated; one mammoth paw was lifted in midgesture. Separate from the statue, strapped around its neck, was a collar and small box.

Twigg pressed a button.

The tiger’s anguished roar filled the room, its striped face a Kabuki mask of rage. Like an orange, white and black express train, it raced at its tormentor. Twigg stood like a statue himself.

Several yards distant from its infuriating quarry, the tiger leaped, its maw a slick red cavern, claws extended.

At the last possible moment Twigg pressed another button.

The stasis-transfigured tiger, now vanilla white, fell with a heavy thud to the deep carpet, nearly at Twigg’s bare feet.

“Yes!” said Twigg gleefully. “Like to see even that cool bastard Durchfreude do better.”

Naming the Dark Intercessor aloud seemed to cast a shadow on Twigg’s pleasure.

The man was a valuable nuisance. Every use of his talents simultaneously decreased his utility and increased the liability he represented.

One day the balance would tip decisively on the side of liability.

And then, Twigg grimly suspected, it would take more than the easy press of a button to put Kraft Durchfreude away.

4.

Espresso Eggs

The wide, welcoming, windowed wood door to the Karuna Koffeehouse had its own unique method of announcing customers.

Mounted inside above the entrance was a Laff Bag: one of those innocuous sacks that contained a device to play tinny mechanical maniacal laughter. Every passage through the door pulled the string that triggered the abridged five-second recording.

Making a pompous entrance into the gaily-painted Karuna was practically impossible.

Not that there weren’t folks who still tried.

Fuquan Fletcher for one.

Thurman had just arrived that morning, setting off his own personally impersonal gale of guffaws. This early, he had found his favorite table empty, the one by the moisture-misted south window. Taking a seat, he undipped the cylindrical foam bolster from his cane and arranged it against the small of his back.

The fragrant atmosphere of the Koffeehouse was filled with the gurgles and chortles of various brewing devices, the chatter of the trio of workers on duty, the savoring sipping sounds of sleepy humans gradually coming up to full mental speed with the aid of friendly plant derivatives. The ceiling-mounted speakers suddenly crackled alive with the sounds of Respighi. A wide-mouthed toaster noisily ejected its crisped bagel passengers.

All was right with the world.

If not with Thurman himself.

Lining up his various prescriptions on the tabletop, Thurman tried not to feel too sorry for himself. An attitude that didn’t do any good, he knew from the recent bitter years, though surely easy enough to fall into.

Looking up from his chesslike array of bottles, Thurman saw one of the baristas approaching.

Normal service at the Karuna involved placing one’s order while standing at the long, oaken, display-case-dotted counter separating customers from the employees and the exotic tools of their trade, and then maneuvering with the expeditiously filled order through the crush toward an empty or friend-occupied table. The baristas generally ventured out only to clear tables of post-java debris and swab them down. (And even these incursions into the customer area were infrequent, thanks to the unusual self-policing neatness of most Karuna patrons.)

But for Thurman—and anyone else who obviously needed special attention—exceptions were easily made.

Just part of the thoughtful charm that found expression in the Karuna’s motto:

The place to come when even home isn’t kind enough.

The phrase Thurman always involuntarily associated with the young female barista named Verity Freestone was “pocket-sized.” Pixie-cut black hair topping a seventy-five pound package of cheerful myopia.

Today Verity wore a striped shirt that exposed her pierced-navel belly, brown corduroy pants that would’ve fit Thurman’s twelve-year-old nephew, Raggle, and a pair of Birkenstocks. Verity filled her pants, however, in a more interesting—to lonely Thurman—fashion.

Verity pushed her thick glasses up on a mildly sweaty snub nose. “Hi, Thur. The usual?”

“Um, sure. Except maybe just wave the beans over the cappuccino, okay? The old stomach—”

“Thurman, you look
wicked
peaked. Are you okay?”

“As okay as I’ll ever get.”

Verity eyed the pill vials ranked before Thurman and frowned. “All those unnatural chemicals can’t be good for you. Haven’t you tried any alternative healing methods? Maybe get the old chi flowing. What about vitamins? You take any vitamins?”

Thurman waved the advice away. “Verity, really—I appreciate your concern. But I can’t change any part of my medical care right now. Strict doctor’s orders. I’m barely holding on as it is.”

Verity’s expression changed from faintly hectoring to triumphantly assured. “I know just what you need, Thur.”

This was more than Thurman himself knew. “And what might that be?”

“Some espresso eggs! They’re not on the menu. We—the help, that is —we make them just for ourselves. But I’m gonna fix you up some special!”

The treat sounded nauseating to Thurman. “Verity, I don’t know if I can take any espresso in my eggs—”

“Oh, they don’t have any
coffee
in them. We just call them that because we make them using the espresso machine steamjet.”

“Well, if they’re mild—”

“Mild don’t even come close!”

Before Thurman could object any further, Verity clomped determinedly off.

Thurman plucked the rumpled morning newspaper from the adjacent window ledge and unfolded it. A headline caught his attention:

DISPOSAL LOGS MISSING FROM GULF WAR

CIA BLAMES ACCIDENTAL ERASURES

He made an effort to focus on the smaller print.

Just then the door laughed.

Fuquan Fletcher was the Karuna’s coffee-bean roaster. A master at his craft, he was indispensable to the quality of the Karuna’s drinks, and thus responsible for much of its success.

That single and singular virtue failed to compensate for the fact that he was an utter prick.

At least in Thurman’s eyes. But not, he suspected, in his alone.

Always dapperly dressed and impeccably groomed, the trim mustachioed Black man had no admirers more fervent and appreciative of his immense hypothetical charms than himself. He was a loud walking arrogant billboard for his own athletic, sexual, financial and terpsichorean prowess.

“Ladies!” bellowed Fuquan from the door. “Show me a hot oven, and I’ll get right down to some sweaty work!”

Returning to Thurman’s table, an unfazed Verity passed by her coworker. “Morning, Fuquan.”

The man made as if to embrace her, a move Verity deftly eluded with a twist and a skip, all without spilling a drop of the drink on her tray.

“Freestone! I got you pegged, girl! You’re one of them sex elves like I seen in a comic once! Show the world your pointy ears, girl! Let them puppies out to play! Then you and me will go into your fantasy world!”

Thurman was highly embarrassed by this display. For the
nth
time, he pondered putting Fuquan in his place. Once he would have done it automatically. Visceral memories of R&R barroom brawls tweaked his flaccid muscles. But now he had neither the energy nor the ability.

Verity was unfazed by the familiar routine. “Fuquan, you’d better cut the talk and get to work. We’re running low on Jamaican.”

“One day you’re gonna give me some of your good stuff, Miss Peanut.”

“Don’t count on it. Thurman, here’s those eggs I was talking about.”

Moving irrepressibly on to other equally futile love conquests and bouts of braggadocio, Fuquan went behind the counter where Thurman could see him donning a neck-to-knee apron.

“Don’t you ever get sick of him?”

“Oh, he’s harmless. It’s the ones who don’t say anything you have to watch out for.”

Thurman instantly felt that perhaps he was one of those suspiciously quiet ones, and fumbled for some sort of conversational tidbit, as Verity disburdened her tray onto the table.

“Uh, how’s your dog doing?”

Verity owned a long-haired dachshund (referred to by Fuquan as, of course, “Hairy Weenie”). “Slinky Dog is just fine. He goes out to stud next week. Slinky makes his girlfriends happy, and I make a little extra cash.”

The mention of even canine stud duty saddened and embarrassed the unstudly afflicted Thurman. “Um, great, I guess.…”

“Now, try these, Thur, and tell me what you think.”

Before him, fluffy white-flecked yellow clouds of whipped and steam-cooked eggs seemed to float an inch off their plate. Thurman had never seen such ethereal scrambled eggs. Plainly, there was a component of antigravity to their recipe.

Thurman forked some up and delivered them to his taste buds.

There was not even any sensation of them resting on his tongue. The sweet creamy taste of the eggs seemed to suffuse directly into his bloodstream. Chewing was definitely superfluous.

“These—these are the best eggs I’ve ever had!”

Verity smiled and patted his shoulder. “Part of your regular order from now on, Thurman. Well get a little flesh back on those bones.”

Thurman finished his eggs with gusto, as well as his usual plain bagel half and cappuccino (oh, all right: weakly flavored hot sugary milk). Feeling better than he had in months, he settled back to absorb the busy evolving scene around him.

People-watching was Thurman’s main recreational activity these days. Cost nothing, and took little strength.

Odd Vibe came in. A quiet and generally unsmiling Norwegian who bore the unfortunately twistable name of Otto Wibe, he was the Karuna’s baker.

Thurman could hear Fuquan greet his backroom coworker.

“Odd Vibe, my man! You sleep in those clothes or roll a bum and strip him?”

“Fletcher, you go and sit on a biscotti, by gosh!”

“Oh, sharp one, Oddy! We’ll have you playing the dozens yet!”

Around eleven, Tibor “Chug’em” Gruntpat made his daily appearance. Chug’em was a sanitation worker, fiftyish and gnarled, just coming off shift. He had been up since about 3:00 a.m. Without a word, Buddy Cheetah—drummer for a struggling band called the Beagle Boys, who was working the counter with Verity—lined up four double-mochaccinos in front of the gray- haired muscular man, who knocked them back in a total of sixteen seconds. Then Chug’em left to sleep through the day.

Others less and more memorable came and went, the latter category featuring SinSin Bang and Pepsi Scattergood from the Kwik Kuts salon three doors down the block. As usual, the brace of beauticians were impeccably trigged out. The Misses Mode O’Day. And, natch, their hairstyles had changed since last week.