Liar & Spy (10 page)

“So is it your official job to answer the door?” I ask her while we walk down the long hallway to the living room.

“Pretty much,” she says. “Pigeon’s at practice, Dad’s at work, and Mom’s busy touching up the photos from last weekend’s wedding.”

“What about Safer?”

“Ha!” she says. “Good one.”

Safer’s mom calls to us from her office, where she’s looking at a picture on a computer screen. It’s a woman’s head, blown up to twice the size of a normal head.

“What do you think?” she asks. “Too many flyaways? I want it to look natural.”

“Looks good to me,” Candy says.

“What’s a flyaway?” I ask.

“Hair—see how her hair is blowing around a little? They got married on a dock, the wind was crazy. I’m erasing some of the flying hair because it’s a distraction, but I don’t want
to go too far and remove the illusion of movement, you know?”

I don’t notice anything about the woman’s hair. What I notice is that she has something green stuck between her teeth.

“Oh, I know,” Safer’s mom says. “That’s broccoli. It’s next on my list.”

“Are you supposed to make everyone look perfect?” I ask her.

“It’s part of the deal,” she says. “Believe it or not, you probably won’t want broccoli in your teeth in your wedding pictures either.”

“I wouldn’t care if there was something green in my teeth,” Candy says. “I think it would be kind of funny. And Mr. Orange won’t care either, I bet.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Mr. Orange. That’s who I’m going to marry. Someone who likes orange.”

“You’re going to marry someone because you both like orange?”

“No!” She makes a face. “I hate orange. The color
and
the flavor. It’s the only flavor I don’t like, actually. That’s the whole point. I hate it, he loves it. That way we can always share the pack.”

“Pack of what?”

“Starbursts. Lifesavers. Jolly Ranchers. Whatever.”

“Are you kidding?” I glance at Safer’s mom, but she’s obviously heard this before, and has moved on to the broccoli-teeth problem.

“Why would I be kidding?” Candy says. “I’ve decided that
the whole getting-married thing is kind of random anyway. You know how many times my grandparents met before they got married? Once! They met on a train, and that was it. You should see how much they still love each other!”

“But—”

“And my friend Joanie from fencing told me her parents went out for like ten years before they got married. And guess what? They got divorced like a year and a half later! So I’m going to make it very simple.”

She’s almost making sense.

“I mean, he’ll have to be cute and everything,” she says.

I nod.

“Not like,
television
cute. Real-person cute. Like … a real person.”

“I guess candy is pretty important to you,” I say.

She laughs. “You think? I mean, why do you think my name is Candy!”

“Or maybe you like Candy because your
name
is Candy,” I say. “Ever think of that?”

She stops smiling. “No. That makes no sense.”

Her mom turns to me. “She has it the right way around, actually. Because we let the kids name themselves.”

“When they were—babies?”

“Not babies, exactly. But by age two or so they had expressed who they were and what they cared about most. We just sort of—interpreted.”

She looks completely serious.

Candy nods. “I’ve been obsessed with candy since birth, practically. And same with Pigeon and—pigeons.”

“All birds, actually,” her mom says. “But pigeons are
mostly what we have in Brooklyn.” She laughs and looks at Candy. “And just think. If we had named you at birth, we might have called you Orange! What a disaster that would have been.”

I’m wondering whether to tell Mom this story. It might knock Safer’s whole family back from “smart bohemians” to “nice bohemians.”

“Are you named after anyone?” Candy asks me.

“Actually, yeah—my parents love this artist named Seurat. His first name was Georges. With an
s
.”

“Your name has an
s
?” Candy says. “That’s cool. Like a secret letter or something.”

Safer’s mom smiles. “Oh, I love Seurat.” The way she says “Seurat” is funny—it’s like she starts gargling in the middle of it. And she forgets the
T
, so it’s “Sir”—gargle—“ahh.” I wonder if this is the way actual French people say it.

She turns to Candy. “His color theory was amazing. Instead of using purple, he would put a dab of red next to a dab of blue, and together the colors would be
perceived
as purple. In the mind of the viewer. Isn’t that incredible?”

“Yeah, all the dots,” I say. “He was kind of part artist, part scientist, I guess, just like my parents—my dad is the artist type, and my mom is the scientist type. They actually met in a class called Physics for Poets. In college.”

Then Safer’s mom says, “I can’t wait to meet your mom, Georges.”

“Hey!” Safer is standing in the doorway. “What happened to you?”

“Oh—sorry. I got sidetracked.”

“I was telling him about our names,” Candy says.

Safer glances at his mom. “
Whose
names?”

“Mine,” Candy says. “And Pigeon’s. Don’t worry, I didn’t—”

Safer interrupts her. “Candy, will you just go away, please?”

“I’m the one who answered the door! You know that ding-dong sound you hear sometimes? That’s the doorbell!”

“Fine,” he tells her. “Just go away.”

“Safer,” his mom says. “This is my office. I’m the only one who can tell her to go away.”

“Fine.” He grabs my arm. “Let’s go, Georges.”

When we’re in our beanbag chairs, Safer holds out his flask. “Coffee?”

“So why
are
you called Safer? Your mom says you guys named yourselves.”

He waves the flask impatiently. “Not exactly. Look, we’re wasting time. We need to get into Mr. X’s apartment. To see what the key opens. I have a feeling it’s important.”

“I’m not going into anyone’s apartment,” I say.

“One step at a time,” he says. “Is the gum wrapper still in the door?”

I admit that it is.

“Great,” Safer says. “He’s not home yet. I have a plan.”

Safer’s plan is that I will watch the lobbycam in my apartment while he breaks into Mr. X’s apartment right above me. If I see Mr. X coming in through the lobby, which he says is “highly doubtful,” I will bang SOS on the heating pipe that runs through my kitchen—and through the kitchen of Mr. X.
Safer will hear the banging and run up to his own apartment before Mr. X gets in and murders him.

When I remind Safer that I haven’t ever actually
seen
Mr. X, he tells me not to worry, that I will recognize him because he is the only person who wears all black in May.

“But how are you going to get into his apartment?” I ask. “Isn’t it locked?”

“Not everyone locks their doors,” Safer says thoughtfully.

The next thing I know we’re standing in front of Mr. X’s apartment. It’s the first time I really stop and look at his door. I haven’t noticed the three stickers under the peephole—one for the ASPCA, one that says
Eat Meat Without Feet
, and one that says
Support the Audubon Society
.

“Go ahead, try it,” Safer says.

“Try what?”

“The doorknob.”

“What? No
way
.”

“I already told you, he’s not here.” He points to the gum wrapper, still stuck in the doorframe.

What I Still Don’t Totally Get About the Gum Wrapper Business

According to Safer:

I stick the gum wrapper in Mr. X’s door at night, when Mr. X is home.

When Mr. X leaves his apartment in the morning, the door opens and the wrapper falls out.

Safer checks the door every half-hour starting early in the morning. When he sees that the wrapper is out, he knows that Mr. X has gone out, and Safer puts the wrapper back in the doorframe so we’ll know when Mr. X comes back in.

As long as it stays there, Mr. X is still
out
. It should be safe to enter the apartment as long as someone is the lookout on the lobbycam, watching to see if Mr. X comes into the building.

But I wonder:

What if Mr. X is
out
when I put the wrapper in at night, so the wrapper is actually falling out when he comes
in
, and then Safer replaces it in the morning, when Mr. X is
still in
. In other words,
who knows?

—or—

What if he
is
home when I put the wrapper in the door at night, and the wrapper does fall out when Mr. X leaves in the morning, but then he
comes back
within the same half-hour? Like maybe he just went for a
bagel
.

Again, Safer would replace the wrapper in the door while he’s
home
.

Which would mean that right now, with both of us standing on Mr. X’s doormat looking at the wrapper in the door, Mr. X could actually be
home
or
not home
.

Either one
.

Umami

When I blurt all of this out on Mr. X’s doormat, Safer gives me a look and says that if I keep going down this road, I will be “paralyzed by my own logic.”

“Relax,” he tells me. “I know what I’m doing.”

“I’m not touching that door,” I say.

“Fine.” Safer’s hand shoots out and jiggles the doorknob.

Locked.

He turns and sprints back up to his apartment, and I follow, thinking about how turning someone else’s doorknob is such a small thing but also such a creepy thing.

“It was worth a shot,” Safer says, writing in his notebook. “And now we know he doesn’t bolt it. He just uses the slam-lock.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s the way the knob wiggles—you get to know these things.”

Safer picks up the binoculars and looks through the window.

“Safer,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“What would you have done if the door hadn’t been locked?”

He lowers the binoculars and looks at me. “I would have made a note of it. It would have been an important fact.”

“So you weren’t about to walk in there, right? Into the guy’s apartment?”

“What do you think I am? An amateur? I would never just barge in without a plan, Georges. Planning is essential. That’s why we observe habits, reactions, everything. This is what I’ve been trying to teach you.”

He turns back to the window and raises the binoculars. “People are not so different from birds, you know. If you watch them long enough, you find out everything you need to know.”

“Are the parrots back yet?” I squint out the window toward the nest.

“Not yet. Give them a couple of—
Candy, what do you want?
”

Candy is standing just inside the living room, holding a piece of paper. Safer must have eyes in the back of his head.

She ignores Safer and holds the paper out to me. “I printed this out for you,” she tells me. “It’s about umami—remember the other night, you told us about how there’s this fifth taste?—anyway, it’s kind of interesting. This guy in Japan was obsessed with the idea of discovering the fifth taste, because he knew there had to be more than four, but no one really believed him, or, um, cared, I guess. So he boiled down all this seaweed and got to this deep flavor that isn’t sweet or salty or sour or bitter. It’s some glutamate thing that they put
in Chinese food. Anyway, that’s the fifth taste. It’s also in mushrooms.” She thrusts the paper at me.

“Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

“It’s all in there—and by the way,
umami
means ‘deliciousness,’ even though I don’t remotely like mushrooms.”

I look down at the article and see that she has underlined most of the sentences. “Thanks,” I tell her again.

She starts to walk away, then stops. “It doesn’t really make sense. Delicious totally depends on the person eating the food.”

I nod. “Yeah, I’ve thought about that. Why don’t we all like the same foods? Shouldn’t we be sort of programmed to eat anything that’s good for us? And to spit out anything that’s poison? You know, from evolution?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Like, why do I hate orange? Obviously if I was a cavewoman and I found some orange trees, I should eat the oranges, right? Who knows when I would find food again?”

“Yeah.” I say. It’s kind of funny to picture Candy as a cavewoman wearing those pig slippers.

“I really do hate oranges, though. I can’t even sit across from someone drinking orange juice.”

“Weird.”

Safer is staring at us.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Georges, weren’t you about to ask me downstairs? To help you look for that
key
? Not that it isn’t fascinating about the oranges and the seaweed.”