She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (10 page)

She stopped teasing and stared straight into me. “We've got a kid. School's coming up. Nest might be my thing, Dan.”

For a moment I heard her saying “next” and felt terror and then, as an after-echo, I heard her real voice,
nest, nest.
Pray God “next” was not her thing.

She was amused watching the tracks of listening, not hearing, the twitches of distress as they crossed my face. She didn't need to know what I was thinking. She took a stab at understanding, even consoling me, in her teasing, stubborn way. “Not that he isn't pretty, got his own style—all that linen, jewelry, the notion store he carries around his neck … Brings some fun with him, doesn't he, lover? If a person is susceptible?” She stopped, she meditated on it, she reached to pat my hand. “Not that I'm susceptible that way, dear. To Karim Abdullah.”

But she did take him seriously. Even as a nonfanatic shopper, Priscilla, like most people, liked a man who could give her something she wanted or thought she wanted. Like everyone else, she was a person in want—and so was I. In this case I wanted no part of Karim and she was open to thinking about what part of Karim might be helpful to her.

“This is America, you're a new daddy, may I make a suggestion? Think ahead. That's the schedule. And I have to say he's kind of cute, blowing and dodging and that champagne idea he got from the movies, and his eyebrows going at us a mile a minute—”

“We don't need money that bad.”

“Of course. Since we're rich. Since our son is rich. Since this new daddy is still willing to live day to day.”

“I've liked the days so far.”

“What would it hurt to hear his story?”

There were things I didn't want to know. I didn't think Karim was wired, I didn't know what his most bad connections were, but I believed it was better not to know and to stick to my low-tech investigations and retrievals; lost kids, deadbeat daddies, missing data. I liked what worked for me.

Priscilla was asking: “… and why not? It's a sign of respect, it's the game patriots play in America.” She was talking about money. “We could use some more, husband.”

*   *   *

The waiter at Enrico's, Chad, made a special lunch for Karim when he went on one of his diets. He chopped fresh cherries over bananas. He dug out the pits and chopped the little cherry bits over bananas with cream. The cream, Karim explained, holding my jacket, was because when a man makes sacrifices like this at lunch, he deserves a little pleasure as consolation.

“Tell me what's so bad about a regular check, my friend. For a little collection now and then, just picking up the funds.”

“Thank you.” I said it to mean I didn't need collections, transfers, transport over state or federal borders—no.

“You have a problem with me? If I was Kevin, not Karim? Or Sammy?”

“No.”

“So why not?”

With two fingers I plucked a cherry bit out of his bowl. It was sour. I licked my fingers. “No,” I said.

He liked that. He appreciated dumb stubbornness. He gave me a broad, heavy smile, eyes glowing within their framing edges of eyeliner. He had his heart set. He was a man who enjoyed challenges. “Dan, Dan, Dan,” he said. “Friends-to-be, am I right? Maybe soon?”

*   *   *

Despite happiness, I kept track of some of my old traditions. I still lacked full appreciation of the embarrassed kind of habitual male charmer, those shy San Francisco inherited-money lads with long thin legs and a permanent sailing and tennis tan; they were healthier, fewer-martini, nonsmoking versions of East Side Manhattan walkers to rich ladies, who were in turn trans-Atlantic remakes of stammering English aristocrats with uttah inability to pwonounce the letter
r.
Priscilla's friend Xavier, a fellow docent at the Museum of Modern Art, had a self-made career, but the self that made it was his great-great-grandfather. His father had restored a gold-rush-era warehouse once used for shipments of coffee, the massive grinding of beans, and this Xavier had upscaled into a gaslight-lit Aulde San Francisco shopping village (don't ever use the word “mall” in Xavier's presence).

Priscilla came home giggling from a meeting at the museum. “Someone asked how to clean the Pomodoro—you know, dear, that thing that looks as if Henry Moore were showing Rodin how to do a ‘Maternity' for astigmatic sculpture viewers—?”

“Huh?”

“The Pomodoro in the lobby, you know. It gets greasy from all the public breathing and stuff. So Xavier suggested cleaning it with Windex. Windex! I couldn't believe I was still sitting in that meeting while my darling husband was sending the sitter home and might be longing for me, or at least hungry.”

“Both.”

“You were! I knew it! But quality time with Jeffie passes so fast, doesn't it, and he was so
funny.
”

Xavier and I were not destined to be friends, but I appreciated that he brought some extra comedy into my alert wife's life. It's easy for a new young mother to slip into boredom or blues when she is suddenly burdened with a new husband, a new child, and new and many obligations.

Then one day she said, “Xavier, you remember?”

“How could I forget.”

“He's always there when he needs you.”

“He contributed a case of tax-deductible Windex to the museum?”

“No, seriously. He wants to talk business with you.”

I couldn't imagine Xavier had a long-lost child he needed finding, or that he lent money to the kind of folks who scurried off into the Federal Protected Witness program. More likely for Xavier to be searching for the best full-bodied hair conditioner in the civilized world, a kind of treasure hunt out of my line.

“My business is thriving. I'm inspired by a happy marriage to do more and more investigations. Do I need Xavier?”

“Talk to him, dear.”

*   *   *

We met on the terrace at Enrico's, although he suggested coming to my office upstairs. Somehow, and this irked me about myself, I didn't want him to see the shabby garage-sale look of Dan Kasdan, Private Investigations, World Headquarters. So we sat at the faux-marble table, Chad the waiter serving, while Xavier stretched out his long legs and reminisced that we had seen each other so many times around town but this was the first time we were having a real chat one to one.

I enjoy sentimental reminiscence as much as the next guy. But I found a way to hint that he should get to the point: “I've got to see somebody at Vital Statistics, the Death Certificate Bureau, and parking around City Hall is a bitch. Do you mind getting to the point?”

He smiled winningly; terrific teeth, champion gums. He appreciated the gentle subtlety of my approach.

Although he preferred to link business and social life, thereby making all the days and nights of his life a festival in keeping with the spirit of encouraging the carefree use of major credit cards in The Factory, his restored Aulde Town museum with shoppes (
not
to say “mall”), he did know how to get to the point. He was, after all, not just a native son of the golden West but also a renowned environmentalist, a gourmet cook for small groups of treasured friends (Would Priscilla and I…?), a guardian of San Francisco gold-rush memorabilia, and a savvy investor who had re-restored his father's warehouse just in time for San Francisco's emergence as a tourist destination like Venice, St. Paul-de-Vence, and Virginia City.

The Factory had become a traditional Barbary Coast destination for sophisticated tourists. The walls had survived the earthquake of '06. Now there were flickering gaslights, the Donner Party Saloon serving the Hangtown Brunch on weekends, an art gallery with authentic miniature player pianos, pressed sawdust statues of Enrico Caruso, nuggets from the Sierra, and, as in mall art galleries everywhere, lithographs signed by Salvador Dali. Xavier was opposed to the latter, but the gallery paid its rent and what could he do?

His responsibility was the basic property, keeping it maintained, the bricks rough and authentic, the view elevator that lifted high above Fisherman's Wharf clean and smooth-running. He delegated the leasing jobs to a management company. As the fifth-generation here, his role was mostly that of curator and guardian. Sometimes an authentic brick crumbled and had to be replaced with a new authentic brick. Sometimes the view elevator got stuck and a tourist family was stranded, snapping rolls of film of Ghirardelli Square, the Cannery, and the Golden Gate Bridge, when they really had an urgent need for Softees, walkaway crab cocktails, and T-shirts. Xavier also took responsibility, because he had developed taste over his years of developing taste, for making the decision to preserve the tracks on which the train used to run, carrying coffee into the factory. He had to fight City Hall on that one. The old narrow-gauge rails, embedded in cobblestones he treasured as individuals, were guarded against politicians who always wanted to lay down heartless asphalt; it's their nature. Herb Caen gave him full credit for that one.

People credited Xavier, correctly, with a sense of San Francisco history. He accepted his Oso Californio Ribbon from the Yerba Buena Forever Foundation proudly but graciously. Tradition was not a burden; on the contrary, as he expressed it at the Hangtown Fry Brunch in his honor, it was a privilege. For Xavier, the gold-rush days were still alive, vibrant and as full of resonance as his time on the tennis team at Stanford. In a toast to the Yerba Buena Forever Foundation, he raised his cup of campfire-boiled miner's coffee, eggshells thrown into the pot to precipitate out the grounds, although in this case it was Italian espresso. (“That's a mere detail,” he said, and the assembly chuckled appreciatively. Xavier turned out to be one of their most entertaining après-brunch speakers.) In San Francisco terms, Xavier's was an old family, although he allowed that five generations isn't really a lot if you think of the crowned heads of Europe; even of Monaco.

Xavier's photograph collage of The Factory as it was, workmen in heavy leather aprons, pre-1906 non-union expressions on their beefy faces, and as it is today, visitors with Factory shopping bags, made a popular postcard in the Barbarie Coast Shoppe. The original, entitled “Les Ouvriers Then & Now,” hung in his office. So he knew from experience what it was to be creative. The arts had a friend in Xavier; the museums, the chamber music, the theater, the more civilized performances (not that garbage washed into San Francisco by the sixties, of course).

“We need to organize a better security system. Shoplifters these days, you know—there's a whole race of them. Absent deterrence, they even try to rip off the gas jet gizmos—they're from Belgium, cast in a foundry there. I just don't know what they want with a piece of rare industrial sculpture, try to sell it, I'm sure.”

“Sounds logical. Unless they're collectors.”

“Not to speak of the prints—I've lost an original ‘Vue de l'Entrée de la Baie de San Francisco,' provenance Thierry Frères, hand-tinted—the thief could even tell which was the original lithograph, not a copy. Gave me a bad day, let me tell you, Dan. To make a sad story short, my insurance carrier says I've got to set up something that … Well, you know, you put a green uniform on a ghetto kid, you badge him, you bond him—he's still a ghetto kid.”

Shook his head ruefully. What a century we live in.

“You want me to be your security guard?”
Absent deterrence? What is this guy?

“Dan, please. No, I mean hire a crew, just run the drill—train or manage, whatever it takes. I want to protect the restaurant from check-beaters—they even crawl out the potty room window at the Hangtown Fry, run down the up escalator—offer complete security to all my tenants. Listen, we had a flock of gypsy pickpockets during the Christmas rush, we also get Colombians and Bolivians who go to school for that sort of thing, plus the Mexicans don't even need to attend Snatch Academy—”

He was rushing, he was eager, he had innate zest when he got into it. He also had tact. He smelled reluctance. His antennae were more sensitive than your average-issue San Francisco trust fund baby's.

“Chad,” I said, “offer the man a refill.”

“Actually,” said Xavier, “how about a double latté?” He didn't specify caf or decaf, nonfat, lowfat, or whole milk, cinnamon or a sprinkle of chocolate; he was tending to business. “So?” he asked. “You just draw up an informal plan, I can assure you I trust your judgment of what I'll need—just cost up the estimate and we can revise it as we go along—”

“Xavier,” I said, “I appreciate this vote of confidence. But I have to tell you something about myself. There's a reason I'm a private eye. I write my own checks. I only use part-time assistants when I stumble into something over my head. I like to clean up messes where I control it personally.”

“I don't think of you as a snoop, Dan.”

“I'm sure you don't, Xavier.”

“Priscilla thought you could be tempted,
challenged
 … an
opportunity
—”

“I don't do security. I'm small-scale, small-time if you prefer, for a reason. It's personality, maybe it's even character if you want to put a grand name on it, it's the way I am. Priscilla probably told you I'm a loner—”

“All she said is that you're brilliant at what you do and you could do more.”

“She said that?”

Xavier was nodding across the terrace at Enrico's to Karim Abdullah. San Francisco is a metropolitan village. I waited until they had finished their pantomime greetings.

“See, Dan,” Xavier went on, Xavier fortifying his argument with every serendipitous moment, “not only your absolutely ravishing wife but also Karim recommends you as the best, the top, the crème de la crème—”

“Of things I don't do,” I said. “I do investigations, personal matters. Lose a child and I'm your guy. Need a bill collected from a deadbeat gone out of state, I got frequent flier plans on all the major airlines. For getting in a deadbeat's face I got a knack. But I don't want to get into big business, what I call. Not even medium big business with tax forms, payroll plans, health insurance, hire a bunch of guys with phony badges … Am I making myself clear?”