The Deed (6 page)

“Say again?” said Jason.

Nick shrugged. “They’re not paralyzed by inaction.”

“But they may be acting wrongly. Or foolishly.”

“Yep.”

“Okay…,” Jason began slowly. “So can you look me in the eye and tell me you’re sure you want to be a currency trader for the rest of your life?”

Nick leaned calmly into the table and said methodically, “I’m sure I want to be a currency trader for the rest of my life.”

A moment of silence followed. “Jesus,” said Jason, running one hand through his hair. “Look at me. I’m playing Truth or Dare with a pathological liar.”

“I’m sure it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life
right now,
” Nick clarified. “And the instant I’m no longer sure, I’ll make the necessary changes, or I’ll move on.”

Jason marveled, not for the first time, at his friend’s uncanny sense of conviction. Nick had been cocky when they were roommates in college, but in the years since their graduation, his brazen swagger had blossomed into an absolute certitude, an
authority.
It no doubt served him well in poker-faced trading; clearly, Wall Street had been good to Nick, and Jason didn’t doubt for a minute that his friend really
did
intend to make the Street his permanent home. He envied Nick’s confidence and resented it, too, as it stood in such embarrassingly stark counterpoint to his own wheel-spinning postcollegiate limbo.

“Well, maybe that’s where I am,” Jason said.

“Which…ready to move on?”

“Maybe,” Jason replied. “I’m not sure.” He looked out the open doorway again, where the rain was coming down harder now, graying the afternoon sky and sweeping the street in thin, misty sheets. “Maybe I just need a vacation. A nice little three-day bender.”

“You just need to get laid, my friend,” prescribed Nick, the eternal sybarite.

“Hey, that reminds me,” said Jason. “This morning I got a phone call from this girl who says she’s been following me.”

“Interesting,” said Nick, clearly amused. “Old squeeze?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Jason. “Not that I recall, anyway.”

“They’re the most vindictive,” Nick observed. “The ones you can’t recall, I mean. Almost by definition. Did I ever tell you about the time an old girlfriend chased me through Tijuana with a machete?”

Jason ignored him. “Anyway, she doesn’t sound dangerous.”

“Okay,” sighed Nick, rolling his eyes. “Look, if you need to do the witness protection thing, I know a good plastic surgeon.”

“I’m surprised you
aren’t
a plastic surgeon.”

“So what does she want?”

Jason recounted the mysterious morning call, ignoring Nick’s ineffable grin and self-consciously leaving out his own odd attraction to the mystery girl.

“I’d roll with it,” Nick advised, semi-surreptitiously checking his watch. “Go have some drinks. Don’t look a gift babe in the mouth.”

“Oh, I’m definitely intrigued,” Jason assured him. “I’d just feel more comfortable if I knew what she wanted.”

“Assume she wants a ride on your banana boat,” he advised. “If you’re wrong, she’ll let you know.” He stood up and grabbed his plate.

Jason shook his head. “I don’t think she wants my banana boat.”

Outside, they joined a bedraggled handful of pedestrians huddled under the awning as the rain pounded the street. Jason, noticing that Nick was unarmed against the elements, tapped his own umbrella on the ground with a jaunty little Gene Kelly lilt.

“So when are you meeting her?” Nick asked, ignoring him.

“Tonight, after work.”

“Nice,” Nick observed. “Go for the kill.”

“Her idea.” Suddenly, Jason brightened. “Hey, maybe she
does
want a ride on my banana boat.”

“Aye aye, cap’n.”

Jason grinned. “I’ll keep you posted.”

They shook hands, an absurd piece of formality Jason always wished could be accomplished with a bit more irony. “Good luck tonight,” said Nick. “If you have any equipment trouble, tell her she can give me a call.”

Nick stepped into the rain with one arm upraised, and managed to haul in a taxi on the first cast. The choreography was incredible—the cab swooped in to the curb just as he arrived, and a single giant step over the swollen rain gutter took him into the warm, dry interior of the car. As the door slammed, Jason shook his head in amazement, trying to lock open the stupid, capricious umbrella as Nick’s window rolled down.

“Make sure she pays!” shouted Nick over the rain. “This ain’t 1960.” His friend’s hair, Jason couldn’t help noticing, had acquired an appetizing wet look.

Ye Olde North Taverne, two and a half stories of peaked wood gables, shuttered eight-pane windows, and a faded swinging sign lettered in bony Old English script, crouched like a decrepit old rummy among the strapping young glass-and-steel titans of Midtown.

It was a calculated deception. In truth, there was nothing olde about ye taverne at all, not the calibrated sag in the roofe, not the artificially lumpy bricke floore, not the broade, fake beams spanning the quaintly lowe ceilinge. The building itself dated only to the mid-seventies, when the marketable cachet of Old World architecture was at a relative high. Naturally, Ye Olde North proved much more popular than the authentically ancient bars that dotted New York, with their déclassé locations, their messily crumbling facades, and their inconsistent multigenerational decoration.

Jason smirked contemptuously; even a naturalized New Yorker is entitled to some sneering rights. Now a journeyman of the urban scene, he reveled in his disdain for places like this, which were useful only insofar as they tended to centrifuge out the most obvious and clueless tourists.

Checking his watch as he entered, Jason found he had plenty of time for a preliminary cocktail before his appointment. An early buzz conferred a certain positional advantage on a first date…if that’s what this was. An afternoon of expenses and busywork had forged in him a powerful thirst, the type o’ thirst that can only be slaked by an ale served in an authentic replica pewter tankard.

Finding an empty booth beyond the end of the bar, Jason leaned his briefcase against the seat back and carefully folded himself into the narrow seat, taking pains not to foul his suit on the unwiped vinyl tablecloth. Bouncing once on the too-cushiony Naugahyde perch, he cast an eye around for waitress service, watched a few mute moments of ye olde basketballe on the little TV behind the bar, and gradually let himself be absorbed by the quaint local fauna. A trio of women in identical blue dresses—flight attendants?—erupted in laughter over some petty scandal; a pair of nerdy double-breasted vultures (mustaches, furtive eyes darting down blouse tops) made a lazy infinite loop around the bar.

As always, Jason paid particular attention to the female denizens, unabashedly poring over their forms and faces with voyeuristic intensity from the shelter of his booth. None of those immediately visible warmed his gravy in particular, but girls would come and go over the course of the evening, naturally, and all available plays would eventually make themselves known. Of course, he wasn’t here alone, he reminded himself, resisting his mind’s impulse to continue pointlessly speculating about the morning’s enigmatic phone call.

With authentic replica waitresses apparently in scant supply, Jason hauled himself up with a sigh and strolled to the bar, leaving his briefcase to guard his seat. There, he watched with mounting annoyance as the unconcerned barkeep squeaked glasses with a hand towel, oblivious to all entreaties and crumpled offerings, shifting his weight in a casual way that made it clear he hustled for nobody, bub. It was minutes before Jason could lure him over with a twenty so crisp it felt counterfeit to the touch.

A woman in red glanced over from a nearby stool, and Jason smiled conspiratorially but noncommittally—
Jeez, can you believe how slow this joker is?
—waiting until she turned back to her friends to check her out. Nice face, okay smile, sort of a jumbo can. He fiddled with a pressed-paper St. Pauli Girl coaster and relented; nothing deforms the human posterior like a bar stool.

Sauntering back toward his seat with beer in hand, Jason was jostled hard, perhaps intentionally, by a harried, scowling waitress in period dress, an impact that cost him most of the beer.

He looked up angrily from the disaster, but the protest died on his lips because there
she
was, sitting in his very booth as if it had actually been hers all along.

It had to be Amanda; she stood out from the undifferentiated bar-scene background like a Cadillac in a swimming pool. She was attractive, to be sure, but in a strange, exotic sort of way that seemed somehow incidental to her…
presence.
Or maybe it was the hat, a flat, straw-colored number, almost a boater, bound with a black ribbon and set jauntily askew, that seemed so out of place in the dry-cleaned conformity of the crowd she was beckoning him through with one cupped hand:
Come on, come on.

He tried to stare as casually as possible while threading his way toward her. She wore a tan suede vest over a black button-down shirt, a simple outfit that just managed to clamber over the threshold of his natural reluctance to notice such things. Her long, black hair was drawn back in a couple of waves; a smoothly tanned face and a pair of dark, smiling almond eyes became gradually distinguishable as he approached and sidled smoothly into the seat across from her, Naugahyde squeaking unhelpfully.

“Hi,” she said brightly.

Jason smiled and shook her proffered hand in a presumptuous, finger-contact-intensive way. “Hi. Jason Hansvoort,” he replied, adding, “as if you didn’t know.”

An almost goofy grin spread across her face. “Yes, I know. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“So—am I your prisoner?” he said with a smile, firing up the flirting engines as she sat back and adjusted the rolled-up sleeves of her shirt. Overall, he decided, quite a package.

“It’s a long story,” she laughed. “You—”

“Wait one sec,” Jason interrupted, freezing her with an upraised finger and smoothly catching the lacy sleeve of a different, but equally sullen, waitress quite intent on swooping past.

“Could we get a couple of—” Jason paused, turned to Amanda. “What would you like?”

“Oh—um, yeah,” she replied, glancing at his beer before looking up at the waitress. “I’ll have, um…uh…planter’s punch.”

“We don’t have that,” replied the waitress, late for something and straining at the leash.

“I know, I know,” Amanda confessed. “I panicked. I’ll just have what he’s having.”

“Two Basses,” said Jason. “Bass. Whatever.”

The waitress nodded her dull comprehension and sped away, and Jason hooked a thumb at her retreating form as he turned back to Amanda. “Take a good look,” he advised, “because you will never, ever see her again.”

Amanda made a face. “I should have gotten a rum and Coke.”

“You want that? I can get it from the bar,” he said, half-rising. The chivalry card was an easy one; he’d already planned to make every effort to buy all the drinks.

She shook her head. “No, no; this’ll be fine. I can wait.”

“I’m warning you—the last time she came by she was only this tall,” said Jason, holding his hand at chest level.