Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

I didn’t buy an umbrella. It wasn’t raining hard enough to make it worthwhile. I went into a bookstore and killed some time without buying anything, and when I left the rain still didn’t amount to much more than a fine mist.

I stopped at my hotel, checked at the desk. No messages, and the only mail was an offer of a credit card. “You have already been approved!” the copy blared. Somehow I doubted this.

I went upstairs and called Warren Hoeldtke. I had my notebook at hand, and I gave him a quick rundown on what lines of investigation I’d pursued and what little I’d managed to determine. “I’ve put in a lot of hours,” I said, “but I don’t think I’m much closer to her than I was when I started. I don’t feel as though I’ve accomplished anything.”

“Do you want more money?”

“No. I wouldn’t know how to go about earning it.”

“What do you think has happened to her? I realize you don’t have any hard knowledge, but don’t you have some sense of what went on?”

“Only a vague one, and I don’t know how much weight to attach to it. I think she got mixed up with somebody who appeared exciting and turned out to be dangerous.”

“Do you think—”

He didn’t want to say it, and I couldn’t blame him. “She may be alive,” I said. “Maybe she’s out of the country. Maybe she’s mixed up in something illegal. That might explain why she hasn’t been able to get in touch with you.”

“It’s hard to imagine Paula involved with criminals.”

“Maybe it just looked like an adventure to her.”

“I suppose that’s possible.” He sighed. “You don’t leave much room for hope.”

“No, but I wouldn’t say you have grounds for despair yet, either. I’m afraid all you can do is wait.”

“That’s all I’ve done from the beginning. It’s… hard.”

“I’m sure it must be.”

“Well,” he said. “I want to thank you for your efforts, and for being straight with me. I’ll be happy to send you more money if you think there’s any point at all in putting in more time.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll probably put in a few more days on this anyway, just on the chance that something’ll loosen up. In which case you’ll hear from me.”

“I didn’t want to take any more money from him,” I told Willa. “The original thousand had put me under more obligation than I wanted to be. If I accepted any more of his money I’d have his daughter around my neck for the rest of my life.”

“But you’re doing more work. Why shouldn’t you get paid for it?”

“I got paid already, and what did I give him in return?”

“You did the work.”

“Did I? In high school physics they taught us how to measure work. The formula was force times distance. Take an object that weighs twenty pounds, move it six feet, and you’ve done a hundred and twenty foot-pounds worth of work.”

“Foot-pounds?”

“That was the unit of measurement. But if you stood and pushed against a wall all day and didn’t budge it, you hadn’t performed any work. Because you’d moved the wall a distance of zero, so it didn’t matter how much the wall weighed, the product was zero. Warren Hoeldtke paid me a thousand dollars and all I did was push a wall.”

“You moved it a little.”

“Not enough to matter.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “When Edison was working on the light bulb, somebody said he must be discouraged because he wasn’t making any progress. Edison said he’d made great progress, because now he knew twenty thousand materials that you couldn’t use for a filament.”

“Edison had a better attitude than I have.”

“And a good thing, too, or we’d all be in the dark.”

We were in the dark, and seemed none the worse for it. We were in her bedroom, stretched out on her bed, a Reba McIntyre tape playing in the kitchen. Through the bedroom window you could hear the sounds of a quarrel in the building behind hers, loud voices arguing a point in Spanish.

I hadn’t intended to drop in on her. I’d gone out walking after my call to Hoeldtke. I was passing a florist and had the impulse to send her flowers, and after he’d written up the order I found out he couldn’t deliver until the following day. So I’d delivered them myself.

She put the flowers in water and we sat in the kitchen with them on the table between us. She made coffee. It was instant, but it was a fresh jar of a premium brand and no killjoy had taken the caffeine out of it.

And then, without needing to discuss the matter, we’d moved to the bedroom. Reba McIntyre had been singing when we entered the bedroom and she was still hard at it, but we had heard some of the songs more than once. The tape reversed automatically, and would play over and over if you let it.

After a while she said, “Are you hungry? I could cook something.”

“If you feel like it.”

“Shall I tell you a secret? I never feel like it. I’m not a great cook, and you’ve seen the kitchen.”

“We could go out.”

“It’s pouring. Don’t you hear it in the airshaft?”

“It was raining very lightly earlier. What my Irish aunt used to call a soft day.”

“Well, it turned hard, from the sound of it. Suppose I order Chinese? They don’t care what the weather’s like, they hop on their kamikaze bicycles and ride through hailstorms if they have to. ‘Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night shall keep you from your moo goo gai pan.’ Except I don’t want moo goo gai pan. I want — would you like to know what I want?”

“Sure.”

“I want sesame noodles and pork fried rice and chicken with cashews and shrimp with four flavors. How does that sound?”

“Like enough food for an army.”

“I bet we eat all of it. Oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Are you going to have time? It’s twenty to eight, and by the time they deliver and we eat it’ll be time for your meeting.”

“I don’t have to go tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I have a question, though. What’s shrimp with four flavors?”

“You’ve never had shrimp with four flavors?”

“No.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “Are you ever in for a treat.”

We ate at the tin-topped table in the kitchen. I tried to move the flowers to give us more room but she wouldn’t let me. “I want them where I can see them,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.”

She had gone shopping that morning, and besides coffee she’d stocked up on fruit juice and soft drinks. I had a Coke. She got out a bottle of Beck’s for herself, but before she opened it she made sure it wouldn’t bother me.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Because nothing goes with Chinese food like beer. Matt, is it all right to say that?”

“What, that beer goes well with Chinese food? Well, it may be a controversial statement, and I suppose there are some wine growers somewhere who’d give you an argument, but so what?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Open your beer,” I said. “And sit down and eat.”

Everything was delicious, and the shrimp dish was the treat she’d promised. They’d included disposable chopsticks with our order and she used a pair. I had never learned to handle them and stuck with a fork. I told her she was good with the chopsticks.

“It’s easy,” she said. “It just takes practice. Here. Try.”

I made an effort, but my fingers were clumsy. The sticks kept crossing and I couldn’t get any food to my mouth. “This would be good for someone on a diet,” I said. “You’d think somewhere along the way they could have invented the fork. They invented everything else, pasta, ice cream, gunpowder.”

“And baseball.”