10
I LIKE BARS. I don’t drink a lot but I like the air of a good bar—the ripe wisdom of animated conversation, the cutting smell of fine liquor, the sound of laughter among friends. Ollie’s was a good, simple bar. Quiet most nights, a wide, oaken bar surface, stools topped with leather that bore the imprints of loyal and regular customers, not a lot of kitsch on the walls—just mirrors from the beer companies and framed photos of Ollie’s father, the original owner, with many of his longtime customers. The regulars were a bit of a mix, older folks who’d been in the neighborhood a long while, younger folks with a bohemian bent who might be borrowing money from parents to pursue art or internships. Now and then the Manhattan-commuting professionals would slum at Ollie’s, and they tipped well and drank imports and more lavish cocktails. But the people, most of them, were nice. No one asked me questions. I just served the drinks, made idle talk when required, and no one knew my hell.
The Company got me an apartment three streets over from Ollie’s, on the edge of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. It wasn’t cheap, but I wasn’t paying the rent, and the building I was in was seeing several units remodeled, so I didn’t have many neighbors. Howell, no doubt, liked my isolation. I assumed that Ollie’s and my place were being bugged, perhaps even with cameras hidden inside. Probably installed by August. I found the bugs, four of them, and the next morning I walked straight to the van, and as they stared at me in surprise, I laid the bugs on the van roof in a nice straight line. Then I walked away. The next day they had a new car to follow me in and I didn’t find any replacement bugs. Didn’t mean they weren’t there, though.
It was like life in a cage. But it wasn’t the stone prison cell. I wondered how long Howell’s men would keep an eye on me, and, if I didn’t draw out Lucy’s kidnappers, if they’d shutter me back behind bars.
I thought about how to escape. I would do myself no favors by rushing. I was still in a cage, but a cage where I could move. I did not want to be back in the Polish prison.
And when I wasn’t serving drinks, I thought about Lucy and The Bundle.
One day in late March, I arrived a bit hurt. A bicycle courier had sideswiped me while crossing a street and I’d fallen, scraping my forearm. My shadows did nothing to help me. I rolled up my sleeve to keep the shirt clean and went into the front; it was early afternoon on a Saturday and only one customer sat along the bar.
She was a few years older than me, maybe thirty. Pretty but with eyes of hard quartz, a slash of a mouth. Her cheekbones would have made a photographer contemplate a next great shot. She wore black slacks and a dark sweater. Her hair was blondish, the color of fresh straw, and cut to just above her shoulders. She picked up her neat whisky, drank it carefully. She moved with precision. She was not looking at me but I thought she was entirely aware of me. My first thought was: She’s major trouble.
“Do you have a first-aid kit?” I asked Ollie.
“Yes, in my office.” Ollie sounded irritated. I’d interrupted a discussion between him and the woman. He jabbed a thumb at me. “This one. Runs like a maniac, bouncing off stairs and buildings and such. He’ll fall and break his neck and then I’ll be out a halfway decent bartender.” Ollie felt self-esteem to be overrated.
The woman surveyed me. “L’art du déplacement?” Her voice was low and cool, like a summer breeze coming out of a tree’s shadow, and she had an odd accent I couldn’t quite decipher. She was beautiful to look at—although I had no real eye for any woman but Lucy—but I did not like her.
But she’d used the original French name for parkour running. I nodded. “Are you a traceur?” I asked. A term for parkour runners, drawn from the French term for a special kind of bullet that leaves a trail.
“Oh, no. I used to live in Paris. I used to watch the kids trying parkour, running along the edges of buildings, throwing themselves from rooftop to rooftop, amazed that they didn’t break their legs.” She smiled the slash-smile again. “I wished I had their nerve, their fleetness.”
“I say if you want to run an obstacle course, get on a track.” Ollie poured more whisky in the woman’s glass, although she hadn’t asked.
“But life’s an obstacle course,” the woman said. “The runners run in the world we live in, not an artificial one.” She turned back to me. “I always thought they looked like animals.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“In their grace. Wolves on the street. Hunters. The runners looked to me like a pack, closing on prey.” The woman sipped her whisky. “I have a fondness for wolves.”
It was exactly the sort of bizarre comment you hear in a bar that would make no sense anywhere else but seems reasonable in dim light with the sting of booze on your lips. Ollie stared at the woman, auditioned an unsure smile, and decided to end the discussion of wolves with introductions. “Hey, Sam, this is Mila.”
Mila offered a hand. I shook it. “Are you a regular, Mila? I’m still learning who’s who in Ollie’s kingdom.”
“She’s a wandering regular. Stops in when she’s in town, which is only like three times a year. And then I can’t get rid of her for a week.” Ollie grinned. “She keeps wanting to buy the bar from me but you know I will never sell.”
“I can work on him for you,” I said with a polite bartender smile. “I’m sure he wants to retire to Florida.”
“Oh, God, no,” Ollie said. “New York till I die.”
“He won’t sell, but he listens to my proposals because he sells me a bottle’s worth of Glenfiddich during that week.” Mila kept her hands folded on the bar in front of her, primly.
“Nice to be able to travel,” I said.
“The world is a smaller place these days. Much smaller.” Mila shrugged—a small, elegant gesture. “Be careful on your parkour runs, Sam. Ollie will not spare the whip if you’re on crutches.”
“Sam I don’t need to whip. The others, Jesus, Mila, you can’t believe it. How hard is it to pour neatly and quickly and accurately into a glass? To pour? Gravity does the work. This is not surgery. I tell you, that day-shift guy, he sloshes my profit margin onto the floor and I mop it up…”
I raised my arm. “I better bandage this.”
I found the first-aid kit in Ollie’s cramped office. There was a desk, with scatterings of papers, an ancient, grinding PC Ollie had never quite mastered (I’d had to help him do searches on the web and also recover a lost spreadsheet), and a safe. The safe would not be difficult to crack; it had a keypad and, considering Ollie’s general loathing of technology, I suspected the pass code would be a simple one to guess.
Arm tightly bandaged, and dressed to work, I went back out to the bar. Mila was gone, bills tucked under her glass. She was an excellent tipper.
“She completes me,” Ollie said. “Damn. I like her but there’s no hope.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Everywhere.”
If Howell wanted to have me followed by someone other than his normal teams, or wanted to insert someone into my life, he might pick a person like Mila. Or if the Money Czar was coming after me, he might send someone like her.
But. But she had a history with Ollie. Unless Ollie was lying about that, and was in Howell’s pay. Hello, madness. You see how your mind starts to twist: you suspect everyone. I went back to wiping down the bar, trying to blank my mind.
“Hey, I got this for you.” Ollie pushed a thick book at me. I looked at the cover. A bartender’s guide. I opened it to the end to see how many pages it was: 508. Very comprehensive.
“Preparation is key so you don’t mix drinks wrong and waste liquor,” Ollie said. “Take it home.”
“I will never make most of these drinks.”
“You strike me as a guy who likes to be prepared.” Ollie was right.
The week inched past. Dave with his Budweiser, Meg with her pinot grigio, the Alton brothers with their pints of Guinness every Friday night; they’d watch the pour you did as though you were splitting a diamond. I worked, I ran, and Howell’s two shadows followed me everywhere I went. At night I lay in bed and I flicked through the five-hundred-page bartender’s guide. It relaxed my mind to consider the thousands of cocktails crafted by humanity; each a perfect little mix of what was at hand to produce a desired result. That was the pattern of thinking I needed to solve my own problem. What elements, mixed together in what order, to create a sublime result.
How to get a gun, how to get documentation to get overseas, how to escape Howell’s constant watch.