Talk Talk (12 page)

She didn't respond, didn't glance down at his finger or up at his face. She seemed as entranced as he, her head lolling against the frame of the open window, legs crossed and one foot dangling as if it was barely attached, and that made him smile--here she was, relaxed for the first time in weeks, a little road trip, the prospect of Milos and an end to her troubles working on her like a massage. He had to point again before her eyes went to his lips. “One-three-three-seven,” she said, squinting through the windshield to track the numbers on the storefronts.

There was no shortage of parking--the town seemed almost deserted--and they emerged to eighty degrees and sun and a light breeze with a distant taste of the sea riding in on it. The trees bowed and waved. A pure deep chlorophyll-rich square of green crept back from the curb across the street and wrapped itself around some monument to war veterans or a mayor gone down to the exigencies of time. It was all very--what? Very calming. Ordinary. Real.

Milos' office was above a Korean grocery that stocked nothing but Mexican specialties and beer, and Milos himself answered their knock. He was younger than Radko, thinner, with sucked-in cheekbones and tight discolored lips, but he wore his hair the same way as his cousin, gel-slicked and glistening like the nose of something emerging from the sea, with an orchestrated dangle of individual strands in front. It took Bridger a minute, and then he understood: Elvis Presley in “Viva Las Vegas.”

“So, yes,” Milos said, in the same dense indefinable accent as Radko, waving them into the office, “you are looking for a thiff, I know, I know.”

He offered them seats--two straight-backed wooden chairs--and dropped into a swivel chair behind a desk that might once have been a library table, gouged and pitted and with nothing at all on the barren plane of its surface except for a single old-fashioned rotary phone. The rest of the decor ran to patterned wallpaper, a bookcase filled with what seemed to be birdwatchers' guides and a long unbroken line of phone books, two hundred or more, that climbed up the near wall like some sort of fortification. Dana perched briefly at the edge of her chair, but almost immediately she rose and began pacing, making liberal use of her hands as she spewed out the story, Bridger elucidating and interpreting whenever Milos' gaze seemed to grow distant. It took five minutes, no more, and then she ran out of words and sat heavily beside him. They both looked to Milos, whose face revealed nothing.

“All this I know,” he said, and held out his hands, palms up. “My cousin,” he added, in a long whistling sigh.

A protracted moment swelled and receded. It was oddly silent, as if the rest of the building were deserted, the grocery notwithstanding, and hot, too hot, the pair of windows behind Milos' desk painted shut and the fan in the corner switched off--or no longer functioning. Bridger exchanged a look with Dana--she was drained, her shoulders slumped, the drama over--and he wondered what they were even doing here. Milos, as Radko had confided, mainly worked divorces, peering through suburban windows, watching motels from across the street, and his office didn't exactly inspire confidence. He was definitely low-tech. And this thief, this man in the photo, this voice on the phone, was as high-tech as you could get.

Milos finally broke the silence. “A man such as this,” he intoned, pulling open the drawer of the desk and removing a smudged file folder, “he is not so smart as you think.” He took a moment, for dramatic emphasis, and slid the folder across the table to Dana.

Inside was the fax of a police report from the Stateline, Nevada, Police Department and there, leering at them, was the now-familiar face. The man's name was recorded as Frank Calabrese, born Peterskill, NY, 10/2/70, no address given--“Transient,” the report said, “Sex M, Race W, Age 33, Ht 6-0, Wt 180, Hair BRO, Eyes BRO, SS#?, D/L 820 626 5757, State NY”--and he'd been arrested for forgery at a Good Guys store, where he'd attempted to acquire credit in another person's name--Justin Delhomme--and purchase a plasma TV worth $5,000. He was carrying a second driver's license, a California license, that showed him to be a.k.a. Dana Halter, of #31 Pacific View Court, San Roque.

Bridger could feel the excitement mounting in him--here he was, the son of a bitch, “nailed”--and he glanced up at Milos in gratitude and elation, and how could he ever have doubted him? “So his real name's what, Frank Calabrese?”

Milos tented his fingers and looked wistfully at Dana, whose head was bowed as she scanned the report, oblivious. “You are jumping,” he said, never taking his eyes from Dana. “Because this is not his name, why would it be?” He shrugged. “Just another alias.”

Sensing something in the air, Dana looked up.

“But he is not so smart, you know why?” Milos went on, pointing a finger at Dana. He let out a long breath. “Because he is in love with you.”

Dana looked to Bridger as if she hadn't read him right, then turned back to Milos. “Love?” she echoed.

“With “you”,” he repeated.

“You mean, he's in too deep--he's got too much invested in this scam or whatever it is to give it up, right?” Bridger offered.

“Who you are,” Milos said, everything freighted on his lips, “he is. You can catch him now.”

Almost involuntarily, Bridger murmured, “But how?”

The sun glazed the windows, a smear of something suspended there in a tracery of false illumination. Bridger smelled his own sweat, primordial fluid, a funk of it, and he could smell Dana too, prickling and acidic. He wanted a beer. He wanted the beach, the ocean, peace and union and love, and what he had instead was this overcooked room and Radko's cousin who was so cryptic he could have been writing fortune cookies in a factory in Chinatown. “How?” he repeated.

Milos pushed the hair out of his eyes, only to have it spring back again in a spray of glistening black vectors, and then he reached into the drawer a second time and shoved a piece of paper across the table to them. On it was written a postbox number in Mill Valley. “This,” he said, drawing it out, “is where bill goes. For cell phone. The address on this account is yours and landline number too, but bill goes here.” He was smiling now. “Very friendly man in Collections. I think you know him: Mr. Simmonds?” Another shrug. “It is a small thing.”

The clumsy lips, the imbalance of the accent: Dana wasn't reading him, so Bridger translated for her as best he could. She watched him carefully, then shifted in the chair. “But what do we do about it?” she asked, her face drawn down to nothing.

Milos' voice rode a current, higher now, as if a breeze had caught it. “You go,” he said. “You are Dana Halter too, no? You have proof?”

She nodded.

“Then that is “your” box.”

Sunday morning, early, they left San Roque in Dana's Jetta, headed north. Bridger had meant to tell Radko in person--he'd made his choice, for love, for support, for Dana--but in the end, he opted for the easy way out: e-mail. “Sorry. Gone one week. Emergency. Bridger. P. S. See you next Monday?”

The sun was behind them as they pulled out of town on the Coast Highway, the ocean gathering light and throwing it at the pavement, the car a leaping shadow just ahead of them. Dana sat in the passenger's seat beside him, her face soft and composed, her hair still wet from the shower and pinned up in a way that showed off the line of her jaw, the sharp angle of her cheekbone, her ear, whorled and perfect as a shell. She'd held him a long while that morning and then pulled back and signed “I love you,” the index finger pointing first to her heart, then both hands crossed in an embrace and finally the finger coming back to him, and he couldn't resist her. They'd made love the night before, slow and languorous, the bed a raft at sea in the dark and silence of the room, and they fell to it again, on the rug in the hall after she'd come dripping from the shower and given him the sign: “I... love... you.”

What was he feeling? Burnished. Shining. Polished like a gem. The radio was cranked and she was bent over her laptop, alternately tapping at the keys and glancing up to stare out over the stacked-up waves with pursed lips and unseeing eyes, isolated from the moment and this place and the world. The music crept into him and he tapped out the rhythm on the dash. An old song, familiar as blood. “Who, who, who, who, / Tell me who are you...”

SHE LOOKED UP from the screen and saw the sea spread out before her, the stalled distant waves like interlocking tiles, the spilled milk of the clouds, sun like wax--“metaphor, everything a metaphor”--even as the dim dripping forest of La Bassine dissolved in a blaze of light on water. Bridger was beside her, present and visible, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time on the dash. His chin bobbed, his shoulders dipped and rose. One and two, one and two. And now he was singing, singing in perfect silence, his lips pursed as if he were blowing out a whole birthday cake's worth of candles. She glanced at the LED display on the radio: 99.9, classic rock. He was singing some immemorial song he knew and she didn't, singing to himself, everything about him alive and focused and beautiful, running with the sound. She didn't stop to think what it meant to go there, to that place where the hearing were transported in the way she was when she was writing or reading or locked away in the dark chest of the cinema while the shapes joined and convulsed on the screen and she saw with a clarity so intense she had to turn away from it; no, she just let herself feel it through him, through the weave of his shoulders and the rhythmic slap of his hand, and then she was beating time too.

The landscape sprang away from them. The dash gave and released, their two hands pounding. And then a car appeared in the inside lane and rolled silently past them and he shifted his eyes to her, his smile opening up, and he sang for her, sang to her, more insistent now, more vigorous and emphatic, his lips, his lips: “Who, who, who, who?”

She hadn't thought past the moment, past packing her bags and the two new credit cards she'd got to replace the canceled ones, because it had all seemed so natural, so logical: the thief was in Mill Valley and he had a postbox at Mail Boxes Etc. and they were going to go there and find him, watch him, stalk him. And then what? Call in the police. In her fantasy she saw him striding into the shop to check his mail while they sat outside in the car--they knew his face, but he didn't know theirs--and punched 911 into the cell phone. Or they'd get the mail themselves, find an address, an account number, trace him to his house and nail him there (yes, “nail” him, as you would nail a board to the floor). And in the fantasy she saw a SWAT team swooping down on him, men in flak jackets and protective headgear, candy-apple-red lights flashing on the cars, the helicopter slamming at the air, and she'd confront him then, spit in his face as he was led away in the same inflexible restraints they'd bound her up in, and she'd confront him again in court, the perfect witness in perfect control, the interpreter motionless at her side.

But that was the fantasy. The reality--and it made her stomach clench to think of it--might be less certain, might be dangerous. How stupid was he? How much in love with her base identifiers could he be when he knew he'd been found out? He might be a thousand miles away by now, more than a match for any amateur detective, and with a new name and a new persona. He could be anywhere. He could be anybody. But still, the thought of what he'd done to her without pause or conscience or even a trace of human feeling made her seize with the rage she'd felt all her life, the rage of shame and inadequacy and condescension. Revenge, that was what she wanted. To make him hurt the way she did. Only that.

They'd just passed King City when she looked up next. Bridger was no longer slapping the dash, no longer singing. He had one hand draped over the wheel, fingers dangling, and he was slumped down in the seat, looking tired. Or wiped, as in “wiped-out, eliminated, destroyed.” She touched his arm and he turned his head. “Are you tired?” she asked. “You want to maybe stop for lunch?”

He nodded and that was good enough because she couldn't very well expect him simultaneously to keep his eyes on the road and his lips in her field of vision. But then he turned full-face and said, “What do you feel like--Mexican?”

“Sure,” she said.

He was grinning even as he swung off the freeway and onto the main street--the only street--of a town that consisted of a grocery, a gas station, a cantina and two cramped and competing “taquerias” called La Tolteca and El Sitio respectively. “Good choice,” he said, turning to her as he killed the engine.

They chose El Sitio and couldn't have said why, no appreciable difference between the two places, both dark inside because electricity cost money, both run by the wives, grandparents and children of the men in the fields. There were four tables shoved up against the wall, a chest-high counter, the kitchen. The smells were dark and lingering, but good, a dense aroma of ancient chiles, refried beans in a pot crusted with residue, peppers and onions and the fry pan that was always hot. One of the tables was occupied by two super-sized white women with unevenly dyed hair--travelers like themselves--who were staring moodily down at the foil-wrapped remains of their burritos and clutching bottles of Dos Equis as if they were fire extinguishers. An old man, lizard-like in a white smock and trousers, sat at the table behind them, tentatively poking a pink plastic fork at a plate of scrambled eggs and beans. There was a handwritten menu on the wall.

Bridger consulted the menu a moment, then turned to the woman at the counter. He said something Dana didn't catch--was he speaking in Spanish, was that it?--and then looked to her. “You know what you want?”

“I don't know,” she said, using her hands unconsciously. She looked to the menu and back again. “I can order for myself.”

The woman behind the counter, as reduced and small-boned as a child, though her hair was going gray, watched them impassively. She was there to take their orders and their money and to give them a plastic chit with a number on it and to call out the number when the orders came up, and her eyes betrayed little interest beyond that. The menu was in Spanish: “taco de chuleta; taco de rajas; taco de cazuela; tamal de verduras.” It wasn't a problem. Dana had lived in San Roque for more than a year now and she knew the basics of Mexican cuisine as well as she knew Italian or French or Chinese, and to make it easier for her, since she wasn't prepared to wrestle with the pronunciation--English was challenge enough--there was a number attached to each item. She chose the fifth item on the list, “tostada de polio,” turned to the woman and said, as clearly as she could, “Number Five, please.”

For a long moment the woman merely examined her out of eyes so dark there was no delineation between iris and pupil, and then she looked to Bridger and said something in her own language, which Bridger, at first, didn't seem to understand. She had to repeat herself, and then Bridger nodded, the pale bristles of his hair gone translucent in the long shaft of sun leaching in through the door. “She says she'll have the Number Five,” he said, and then repeated himself in his high school Spanish.

They took the table behind the two women--What percentage of Americans were obese? Thirty percent? Was that the figure she'd read?--and Bridger got them their drinks. He was having “horchata,” she a Diet Coke, out of the can. The women behind them were hunkered over the table, their faces animated, inches apart, exchanging confidences--gossip--and Dana almost wished she could hear what they were saying about their husbands, boyfriends, their ailments and beauty treatments and the children who invariably disappointed them. Instead, she asked Bridger what the woman at the counter had said. “And why didn't she understand me? Wasn't I clear?”

He dropped his eyes. “No, it wasn't that. Or it was. She's--well, her English isn't too good--”

“Yes? But what did she say?”

He looked embarrassed--or reluctant--and she felt her face go hot.

“It was something insulting, wasn't it?”

“I don't know,” he said, and then he said something she couldn't make out.

“It was in Spanish?”

Instead of repeating it again, uselessly, he pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote the word out for her on the back of a paper napkin: “Sordomuda.”

Now she did flush. “Deaf-mute?”

He nodded.

What she wanted to ask was, “How did she know?” but instead she glanced across the room to where the woman sat perched on a stool behind the cash register, her head down, flipping through the pages of a Mexican tabloid; she wore gold earrings, the faintest points of light; a silver cross dangled from her throat on a silver chain. She was perfectly ordinary, like a thousand other women in a thousand other taco stands, Mexican restaurants and “pupuserias,” a woman who knew the feel of the mortar and pestle and the consistency of the “harina” paste shaped to fit the hand and pounded flat between the palms. But who was she? Did she have a deaf son? A deaf sister? Was she deaf herself? Or was she just superior? Contemptuous? Hateful?

Everything was in stasis, but for the right arm of the cook--a man so small and slight he might have been the cashier's brother--which jerked rhythmically as he slid the pan back and forth across the gas burner. After a moment, she turned back to Bridger and signed, “How did she know?” but all he could do was shrug and hold out his hands. When their order came up, he went to the counter and brought back a paper plate and set it before her. The dish it contained didn't look like a tostada. For one thing, there was no shell; for another, no lettuce. Instead, what she got seemed to be some kind of organ meat in gravy and a wash of melted cheese.

“What's wrong?” Bridger asked, his mouth crammed with beans and rice. “Not hungry?”

Very slowly, with the tip of one reluctant finger, she pushed the plate away, and it wasn't worth the explanation. She let her hands talk for her: “No,” she signed, “not anymore.”

“You want to drive?” he asked her. They were standing in the street outside the restaurant, the car glazed with the sun. It was hotter than she'd expected, hotter inland than she was used to on the coast. The heat drugged her and she didn't see the woman watching her from behind the window of the “taqueria” or the pair of lizards chasing one after the other through the dust or the drift of yellowed claw-like oak leaves at her feet. She didn't want to drive. She wanted to stare into the screen and shut out all the rest and she let her hands tell him so. A moment later, the town was behind them and only the vibration of the steel-belted radials, riding on air, told her they were moving.