Talk Talk (11 page)

Divorced meant time on your hands, time to pick and cavil and criticize, and Peck didn't take criticism well. He never had--in fact, the surest way, all his life, to make him react, was to call him out on something, whether it was his chores at home when he was a kid, or the dick of a math teacher he'd had in the ninth grade trying to humiliate him at the blackboard or the succession of half-wit bosses he'd had from junior year on and every one of them thinking they were God's gift to the world. He knew differently. No matter what, he was always right, even if he was wrong, and he could prove it with one jab of his right hand. Maybe other people--the losers of the world--could turn the other cheek, bow their heads, suck it up, but he couldn't. He had too much pride for that. Too much--what would you call it?--self-respect, self-love. Or confidence, confidence was a better word. At any rate, Frank started living at the bar, inhaling Glenfiddich all night long and getting nastier and crankier and crazier by the day. And then--it was inevitable--there came a night when Peck couldn't take it anymore (some shit about he wasn't ordering the right grade of parmesan and he didn't know real parmesan--“Parmigiano-Reggiano”--from his ass and he was fucking up and costing his boss money) and the youngest manager in Fiorentino's history went down in flames. There was some name-calling, some breakage, and he wouldn't be counting on a reference from Frank Calabrese anytime soon.

Gina was a rock, though. She threw down her apron, emptied the tip jar and stalked out to the car, and within the week she'd found a storefront on Water Street and hit her father up for a loan and Pizza Napoli was born. The place was an instant hit--you would have thought they were giving the pizzas away--and the secret was Skip Siciliano, the pizza chef with the handlebar mustache and the towering white toque he'd managed to coax away from Fiorentino's because Frank was an asshole and Skip couldn't have agreed more. That and the location. People wanted to look out on the broad rolling back of the Hudson and sit at nice tables with sawdust on the floor and strings of salami and garlic hanging from the racks overhead and eat pizza hot from the oven and they wanted antipasto and calzone and homemade pasta too and they wanted takeout and a nice selection of medium-priced Italian wines. By the end of the first year, he and Gina got ambitious and opened the second place--Lugano, a name they picked after closing their eyes and dropping a coin on the map of Italy. The idea behind Lugano was to make it an upscale place, full menu, osso buco, seafood, cotechino, specials every night, caponata in a cut-glass jar on every table and crostini the minute you sat down.

Then Gina got pregnant and told her father, and her father--a loudmouth and bullhead in a league of his own who'd never warmed to Peck because he wasn't Italian and even if he had been it wouldn't have mattered because nobody was good enough for his girl, not the right fielder for the New York Yankees or Giuliani's favorite nephew--insisted that they get married within the month. From Peck's point of view, the whole thing stank. He didn't want a kid, didn't want to be tied down at so young an age, and he resented Gina for letting it happen in the first place. But he went along, not coincidentally because her father was the controlling partner of both Pizza Napoli and Lugano, and he loved her, he did. At least then he did. They were married at the Assumption church, big reception at the country club in Croton, no expense spared, Peck's mother there in the front pew, drunk as usual, a buddy from high school he hadn't seen in six years--Josh Friedman--standing in as best man, and it was a fait accompli.

The thing is, it all might have worked out, a slow upward climb into maturity and the fullness of a relationship, the kid, a dog, a house in the country, if it wasn't for Gina. As soon as she got pregnant, she stopped sleeping with him. Just like that. She was always sick, always complaining about imaginary pains, and she got sloppy and let herself go. She never washed her hair. Never picked anything up. And sex. Did he mention sex? Sex was about as frequent--and satisfying--as the comet that comes every four hundred years and then you go out on the lawn and gape up at some poor pale pathetic streak of scum in the sky you can barely locate. Big thrill. Big, big thrill.

Could anybody have blamed him, even the pope and his College of Cardinals, if he began staying late at the restaurant? Even now, even after the jail time and the hate and resentment and going underground and all the rest, he had no regrets. Sometimes he'd just close his eyes and see the glow of the bar at two a. m., the front door locked and two or three of those candles guttering in their yellow globes till it seemed as if the whole place had been sprayed with a fine patina of antique gold, and Caroline or Melanie or one of the other cocktail waitresses sitting there beside him having a slow smoke and a Remy, his hand on her thigh or her breast as if he were fitting her for a custom-made outfit. So casual. So slow and sure. The beauty of it: he'd fucked her the night before and he'd fuck her again tonight. Once he got around to it.

“So jazz--you dig jazz at all?” Jonas was saying, and Peck had been away for a moment there, and at first, for the smallest sliver of a second, couldn't quite place him. “The new Diana Krall--did you know she married Elvis Costello?--it's pretty awesome.” The man was fumbling in his jacket, the big hand moving like an animal caught in a bag, and then he flashed the CD and handed it across the table. “You might want to put this on. It's pretty awesome. Believe me.”

Somehow, Peck's mood had soured. The pans were dirty, the meal stewing down in their guts, the Armagnac evaporated--was the guy using a straw, or what? Plus there was this asshole Bridger, threatening everything, and the first chink in the wall: the credit card he'd laid out on the counter at the Wine Nook was invalid, or so the pencil-neck behind the counter informed him. Natalia--half-playful, half-serious--had accused him of brooding and he'd defended himself, lamely, as in “I'm not brooding--I'm just thinking, that's all.” Now he took the CD from Jonas in its compact plastic case and stared at it absently.

“I think you're going to like it,” Jonas said, leaning in over the table. He was drunk, sloppy, fat-faced. Peck suppressed an urge to punch him. “Isn't that right, honey?” Jonas said, turning to his wife.

“Oh, yeah,” Kaylee crooned, “yeah, I think you'll really like it.” She shrugged, a long shiver that ran up one side of her torso to her shoulders and back down again; she was drunk too, and why couldn't anybody sit down and eat a nice dinner without getting shit-faced? She gave him a wide wet-lipped smile. “Knowing you. Your soulful side, I mean--”

Natalia was nestled into the sofa like a cat, her legs drawn up, shoes off, the snifter cradled in the v of her crotch. She let her eyes rest on Jonas. “It is what, standards--is that how you say? Standards? Such a funny term.”

No one answered her. After a moment, the CD still balanced in his hand, Peck said that he'd once been to the Five Spot with a girl he was dating ten years ago or more and that the band that night--female vocalist, flute, piano, percussion, bass--was like somebody taking their clothes off in the dark because they're ashamed of the way they look, and then he laid the disc back down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. “Listen,” he said, “I just remembered something--if you'll all excuse me a minute. I've got to--got to go out. Just for a minute.”

Natalia said, “But, Da-na, it is near to one in the a. m. Where? Where do you go?”

She was laying into him in front of the guests and that rubbed him the wrong way. He wanted to say something hurtful and violent, but he held back. He was all bottled up. He was wrong, he knew it, and so he said something in melioration, something he shouldn't have said: “I need to make a phone call.”

And now a whole shitstorm of protest and sympathy rose up, Natalia complaining in a little voice that he'd smashed her cell phone and wondering why he couldn't use the landline and both Jonas and Kaylee whipping out their cells as if the cells were six-shooters and this was the OK Corral. What could he say? Nothing. He just waved them off and backed across the room as if he were afraid they'd chase him down, tug at his sleeves, force their phones into his hand, and he snapped a mental picture of their faces--drunken faces, puzzled faces, a little indignant even--as he slipped out the door.

Outside, the fog had grown thick, obscuring everything. It was cold suddenly, the damp reach of it getting down inside his shirt, and he wished he'd thought to bring a jacket, but no matter. He slid into Natalia's car--“Natalia's car:” the registration was in his name and he was the one making payments on it--turned over the engine and worked the button on the temperature gauge till it read 80 degrees. There weren't many pay phones around anymore--they were a vestige of a bygone era, Frank's era, Jocko's, his own dead father's, and they'd be gone entirely in a decade, he would have put money on it--but there were a couple in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and that was where he headed.

He stopped at the bar for a cognac and five bucks' worth of change. He had no idea what it cost to call San Roque, and he probably shouldn't have been doing it, anyway--there were easier ways to get what he wanted--but he couldn't resist, not tonight, not the way he was feeling, so sour and disconnected and twisted up inside. The lobby was over-lit, blazing like some meeting hall, but it was deserted at this hour. He listened to the coins fall and the operator's voice and then the ringing on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Bridger?”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to confirm that your listing in our guide is correct--can you give me a spelling on your complete name?”

“Listen, if you're selling something, I don't want it--this is my private cell and you better, please, just remove it from your records.”

“Oh, I'm not selling anything, not that you want, anyway.” He gave it a heartbeat, just to let everything settle. “It's me, Dana. You know, the Rick James fan.”

There was a silence, festering, the scab picked, the bandage torn from the wound. It made his heart swell to listen to it, to listen to the shithead dangle on the other end of the line, caught out at his own game. “Yeah, uh, hi.”

“Hi yourself, asshole. You think you can dick with me?”

“You're the asshole. You're the criminal. You think you can steal my girlfriend's identity and get away with it? Huh? We're going to track you down, brother, and that is a promise.”

“Girl”friend? The quickest calculation. So he was a she and the fish was on the line. Keep it going, he told himself, keep it going. “I guess we'll see about that, won't we.”

“So you got my cell, big deal. I know where you live. I know where you're calling from right now.”

“Really?”

“Really. You might be calling from anywhere in the 415, but you live in Marin, don't you?”

That froze him a minute--till he realized that was the old cell number, the dead cell number, and what did it matter? A whole lot of people lived in Marin County. Yeah. Sure. But how many Dana Halters? He saw Natalia's face then, her lips, the dark eternally disappointed pits of her eyes, heard her in his head questioning why, why, why do we have to move and what do you mean your name is not Dana? “What do you mean?”

The voice came back at him, a loser's voice, but hard now, hard with the righteous authority of the new kid called out on the playground: “Don't you?”

“Right,” he heard himself say, and he looked up to follow a woman in heels and a tight blue dress picking her slow careful way from the bar to the elevators, “and you live in San Roque.” And then, though he wanted to tear the thing out of the wall, all of it, the black box with the shiny silver panel, the wires and cords that pinned his voice to this place and this time, he very gently put the receiver back in its cradle and walked out the door and into the fog.

WORK HAD JUST BEGUN on the next project Radko had lined up--a time-travel thing in which a group of twenty-first-century scientists, including one ingenue with inflated breasts, a sexy gap between her front teeth and a coruscating pimple dead center in the middle of her nose that had to be painted out in every frame, discover a portal to Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts and have to go around frantically trying to communicate the imminence of the danger in a language no one understands--when Bridger felt someone hovering over his shoulder and looked up to see Radko himself standing there on the scuffed concrete with a pained expression. It was just past ten in the morning. Bridger had spent the night at Dana's and so he'd had a relatively nutritious breakfast (Cheerios with a spoonful of brewer's yeast and half a diced nectarine, plus toast and coffee) and he'd left her hunched over her computer, tapping away at the dimensions of the wild boy's fate. He was feeling relaxed and benevolent, the new project--which no doubt would become as dull and deadening and soul-destroying as the last--engaging him simply because it was new, the computer-generated temples and sunblasted domiciles of Pompeii in diametrical contrast to the burnt sienna gloom of Drex III. He'd been bent over Sibyl Nachmann's face, his mind on autopilot as he painstakingly removed the blemish, a procedure Deet-Deet had already christened a “zitectomy,” when he became aware of Radko.

“She is out there,” Radko said, his voice deep and bell-like.

Bridger looked to the screen, not certain exactly what he meant--was she off the scale as far as looks were concerned or was she grazing the limits of histrionic expression? “Yeah,” he said, nodding, because it was always a good idea to agree with the boss, “yeah, she is.”

Radko waved both his hands vigorously, like an umpire declaring a man safe at third. “No, no,” he said, ““Dana,” she is out there.”

It took him a moment to understand--Dana was in the front office, beyond the uniform line of cubicles and the pouchy droop-shouldered figure of Radko, who was pointing now, his face heavy and oppressed. Bridger pushed back his chair and got to his feet. If Dana was here, then she was in trouble. Something had gone wrong. The first thing he thought of was the man in the picture, the voice on the phone, the thief. “Where?” he demanded, just to say something.

He found her in the outer office, slumped forward in one of the cheap plastic chairs against the far wall. She was wearing the T-shirt and jeans she'd had on when he left the apartment and she hadn't combed her hair or bothered with makeup and there was something clutched in her right hand, papers, letters. Was it her manuscript? Was that it? He crossed the room to her, but she didn't lift her head, just sat slumped there, her shins splayed away from the juncture of her knees, one heel tapping rhythmically against the leg of the chair. “Dana,” he said, lifting her chin so that her eyes rose to his, “what is it? What's the matter?”

There was a noise behind him--Radko at the security door motioning to Courtney, the receptionist, a nineteen-year-old blonde who two weeks earlier had dyed her hair shoe-polish black and banished all color from her wardrobe in sympathy with whatever style statement Deet-Deet was trying to make. She gave Bridger a tragic look and excused herself--“I'm just going to the ladies',” she murmured--and then the door pulled shut and they were alone.

Dana didn't get up from the chair. She didn't speak. After a moment she took hold of his wrist and handed him an envelope addressed to herself from the San Roque School for the Deaf. As soon as he saw it, he knew what it meant, but he extracted the letter and unfolded it all the same, her eyes locked on his every motion. The letter was from Dr. Koch and it said that after consulting with the board he had the regretful duty of informing her that her position had been terminated for the fall session and that this was in no part due to any dissatisfaction that either he or the board might have had with her performance but strictly a result of budgetary constraints. He concluded by saying he would be happy to provide her with references and that he wished her success in whatever new endeavor she might embark upon.

“You know it's bullshit,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “They're firing me. Koch is firing me. And you know why?”

“Maybe not. He says they're eliminating the position--that's what he says...”

Her eyes narrowed, her jaw clenched. “Bullshit. I e-mailed Nancy Potter in Social Studies and she said they're already advertising for a vacancy in high school English. Can you believe it? Can you believe the gall of Koch? And these lies,” she shouted, snatching the letter out of his hand. “Just lies.”

Beyond the windows, two rectangular slits cut horizontally in the wall to let the employees of the inner sanctum know there was another world out there despite all evidence to the contrary, a woman with six dogs of various sizes on a congeries of leashes was pausing beneath the massive blistered fig that dominated the block. A kid in a too-big helmet went by on a motor scooter, closely tailed by another, the asthmatic wheeze of the engines burning into the silence of the room. He felt miserable suddenly, thinking only of himself, selfish thoughts, the what-about-me? of every contretemps and human tragedy. This would mean that Dana was going to have to relocate, no choice in the matter, and where would that leave him?

She was on her feet now, angry, impatient, thrusting out her arms and jerking her shoulders back in agitation. “It's because I was in jail. He blamed me. He all but accused me of dereliction of duty.”

He tried to put his arms around her, to hold her, comfort her, but she pushed him away. “Here,” she said, thrusting a second letter at him as if it were a knife, “here, here's the capper.”

The letter was from the Department of Motor Vehicles. A month earlier she'd sent in her license renewal, just as he'd done himself two years ago. As long as there were no outstanding convictions or special considerations, the DMV had instituted a policy of renewal by mail without the necessity of being re-photographed. Dana had taken that option--who wouldn't? The price of a thirty-nine-cent stamp saved you a trip to the DMV office and an interminable wait in one line or another. All right. Fine. So what was the problem? “It's your license?” he asked.

Her eyes were hard, burning. “Go ahead, open it.” He heard the door crack open behind him and turned to see Courtney's pale orb of a face hanging there for an instant before the door pulled shut again. He bent to fish the new license out of the envelope, hard plastic, laminated, “California Driver License” emblazoned across the top of it. They had her name right, had her address too, but the sex was wrong and the height and the weight and the signature at the bottom. But that wasn't the worst of it. The two photos, the larger on the left and the smaller on the right, were of a man they'd both seen before, and he was staring right at them.

There was no question of going back to work. Dana was in a state. Every day, it seemed, the mail brought some fresh piece of bad news, bill collectors dunning her for past-due accounts she'd never opened, a recall notice for a defect in a BMW Z-4 she'd never seen, notification of credit denied when she hadn't sought credit in the first place. And now she'd lost her job, now she'd be driving on an expired license. “What next?” she demanded, her voice strangled and unbalanced, riding up the walls like the cry of some animal caught in a snare, and she took hold of his arms in a grip so fierce she might have been trying to stop the bleeding, only he wasn't bleeding. Not yet. “Back to jail again? Tell me. What do I have to do?”

He wanted to hold her but she wouldn't let him because he was the villain all of a sudden, the stand-in for the bad guy, the nearest warmblooded thing she could fight against. A man. Hairy legs and a dangle of flesh. A man like the one who'd done this to her. He said, “I don't know, I really don't,” and she still held to her grip, her nails biting into the flesh, both of them fighting for balance. All at once he felt the irritation rising in him--she was crazy, that was what she was. Fucking crazy. “Goddamnit, let go of me,” he shouted, and he shoved her away from him. “Shit, Dana. Shit, it wasn't me, I'm not the one to blame.”

At that moment the door pushed open behind them and there was Radko, with his heavy face and his cheap shoes and his cheap watch. “I dun't like this,” he said carefully, slowly. “Not in my office.”

Dana glared at him. Here was another man to lash out at. “I want to kill him,” she said.

Radko studied the gray abraded paint of the floor. “Who? Bridger?”

Bridger understood that he was at a crossroads here, that there was a choice he would have to make, and soon, very soon, between Digital Dynasty and this wound-up woman with the tangled hair and raging eyes. A mad notion of stalking out the door flitted in and out of his head, but he caught himself. Conflict was inimical to him, a condition he'd always--or nearly always--managed to avoid. “I'm sorry,” he said, ducking his head in deference. “It's just that thing--you know, with Dana and what she's been through? It just won't go away.”

Radko lifted both hands to smooth back the long talons of his hair, then he lifted one haunch and settled himself on the edge of the receptionist's desk and began fumbling for the cigarettes he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket. “This thiff, yes?” he said, his voice softening. “This is it? This is the problem?”

Bridger acknowledged that it was.

“So sit,” Radko said, gesturing to the plastic chairs along the wall, “and you tell me.” And then, to Dana, as he touched the flame of his Bic to the cigarette, “You mind?”

“Yes,” she said, “I do,” but he ignored her.

Over the course of the next half hour, while Courtney went out for coffee and Plum twice stuck her head through the door to assess the situation and deliver updates to the crew and the cigarette smoke rose and the sun inflamed the undersized windows, Dana, who barely knew Radko, unburdened herself, and when she was at a loss, Bridger was there to offer amplification. Drawing at his cigarette, smoothing back his hair, sighing and muttering under his breath, Radko listened as though this were the plot of a movie he expected to bid on. “You know,” he said finally, “in my country this thing goes on all the time. This stealing of the documents, of the people too. Kidnap for ransom. You know about this?”

Bridger nodded vaguely. He wasn't even sure what country Radko came from.

“Let me see that,” Radko said, slipping the ersatz license from Dana's hand. He studied the picture a moment, then offered his opinion that the DMV had screwed up and the computer had sent the license to the address of record rather than the new address the thief had given them. “If you get that address,” he said, glancing up as Courtney came through the street door with their coffees, “then you get this man.”

Dana had become increasingly animated as they worked through the litany of details--how they'd contacted the credit reporting agencies and put a security hold on all her information, how they'd sent out copies of the police report and affidavit to the creditors of the spurious accounts, how they'd gone to the police and the victims' assistance people--and now she wondered aloud just how they might go about doing that. “This guy could have a hundred aliases,” she said, removing the plastic cap from the paper cup and pausing to blow at the rising steam. She took a sip. Made a face. “And how do we get the address? They won't even run a fingerprint trace. Not important enough, they said. It's a victimless crime. Sure. And look at me: I'm out of a job.”

“Milos,” he said.

Courtney had settled back in at her desk, making a pretense of focusing on her computer, and Plum, for the third time, pushed open the security door and let it fall to again. Bridger said, “Who?”

“Milos. My cousin. Milos he is finding anybody.”

The next afternoon--a Friday and Radko gone to L. A. for another “meeding”--Bridger left work early to pick up Dana at her apartment. He had to get out of the truck and ring her bell--or rather, flash it--because she wasn't quite ready, and he stood there on the doormat for five minutes at least till she appeared at the door, but the appearance was brief. Her face hung there a moment, wearing a look of concentrated harassment, the door swung open, and she was gone, clicking down the hallway in her heels, looking for some vital thing without which she couldn't leave the apartment even if it were on fire. He wanted to remind her--urgently--that they had an appointment with Radko's cousin at four-thirty and that his office was in Santa Paula, a forty-five-minute drive, but he wasn't able to do that unless he was facing her and he wasn't facing her. No, he was following her, from one room to another, her hair flashing, her arms bare and animated as she dug through a dresser drawer, pawed over the things on the night table, tossed one purse aside and snatched up the next. “I'm running a little late,” she flung over her shoulder, and slammed the bathroom door.

Bridger wasn't happy--he resented feeling compelled to speed and risk another ticket--but he was resigned. He put his foot to the floor, the tires chirped and the pickup protested, wheezing and spitting as he gunned it up the ramp and onto the freeway, and he glanced over at Dana to see how she was taking it, but she was oblivious. He remembered how she'd told him that when she'd first got her new car--a VW Jetta--it ran so smoothly she couldn't tell whether the engine was actually going or not and had continually ground the starter without knowing it. Only after she realized that people were staring at her in the parking lot--grimacing, clenching their teeth--did she begin to adjust. It was all about the vibration, and eventually she trained herself to pick up the faintest intimation of those precise valves working in their perfect cylinders and all was well. The pickup was another story. Yet once he got it up to cruising speed and kept it there he was able to make up the time with some creative dodging around the cell-phone zombies and white-haired catatonics whose sole function in life it was to block the fast lane, and they pulled into Santa Paula no more than twenty minutes late for the appointment.

The town was a surprise. Instead of the usual California farrago of styles and build-to-suit outrages to the public sensibility, it seemed all of a piece, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. In fact, it all looked hauntingly familiar, the broad main drag lined with one-and two-story frame buildings that must have dated from the forties or earlier, the hardware store, the mom-and-pop shoes and clothes shops, Mexican restaurants, coffee shop, liquor store and cantina, and he couldn't help wondering how many period pieces had been filmed here. Teen movies, no doubt. Greasers in too-perfect '55 Fords and Chevys, cruising, heading for the hop. Dreary dramas about old people when they were young. World War II weepers where the crippled hero returns to receive a mixed message and the streets run ankle-deep with schmaltz. Of course, all this could be re-created today without ever having to leave Digital Dynasty, but still, it did Bridger good to see the real deal, the actual frame-and-stucco buildings of the actual town. They were rolling down the street, going so slowly they were practically parked, when he pointed to the scrawled sheet of directions in Dana's lap and asked, “What was that number again?”