Клео Коул - On What Grounds

He gazed into my face for a long moment.

“Okay, ma’am, I need you to take it easy, okay? I need you to take some deep breaths and sit down.” He motioned to the empty chair at one of the store’s twenty Italian marble-topped tables. “Can you tell us how you found the body—”

“Body?” My stomach turned, saliva filled my mouth. “I’m not…feeling so well.”

Demetrios shot Langley a look.

“Uh, sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean the body. I meant, uh, the girl.”

“Sit down, okay?” advised Demetrios. “You don’t look so good.”

I tried, but couldn’t. It only made me feel worse. All I could think of was what Grandma Cosi used to say to women who’d just suffered a loss or shocking news and came to her kitchen for a reading of coffee grounds. Do something familiar so you don’t faint. I looked up. Saw Demetrios’s name tag.

“That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Let me make you some coffee.”

“What? No, ma’am, that’s not necessary—”

But I was already moving behind the counter, grabbing the tall, long-handled brass ibrik, measuring the water, and placing it on an electric burner.

The cops, mumbling between themselves, seemed unhappy with my activity, but it was helping me feel less numb and more normal. I’d prepared Greek-style coffee (aka Turkish coffee) many times. I’d learned how from my world-traveling ex-husband, who’d enjoyed the strong taste—even more powerful than espresso.

As I made the coffee, the cops stood at the counter and watched. After a minute or so, they began to ask me some questions.

(What time had I arrived this morning? Was the shop open or locked? How long had the girl worked for the store?)

As long as I kept busy making the coffee, I found I could answer pretty well.

(Close to nine. Locked. Six months, but I had known her only one.)

I’d explained how I’d just moved in above the store. How I’d managed the place ten years ago but had left to live and work in New Jersey.

They wanted to know why I’d decided to come back after so long.

“A lot of reasons,” I told them absently.

And over the next few minutes, as I continued to prepare the Greek coffee, I silently reminded myself of a few of them—starting with that early-morning phone call four weeks ago from Madame…

“I’ve done away with Flaste,” Madame had announced that morning without preamble. “He’s an utter moron.”

Flaste? Flaste? I tried to recall with a yawn. Who was Flaste again? And how would Madame have “done away” with him?

The picture of a rotund, effeminate man finally came to mind. A surreal montage ensued: I saw Madame’s wrinkled hands pushing the fat man off the Village Blend’s four-story roof; her bejeweled fingers stirring arsenic into his morning latte; her determined knuckle clenching a revolver’s cold, metal trigger.

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I rolled over. The phone’s death-black cord coiled across my starched white pillow. Blood-red digits glowed next to the bed. I made out a five, a zero, and a two.

5:02 a.m.

Good lord.

Half-opened miniblinds revealed the striated sky—a dark cobalt dome lightening to streaks of pale blue. Silver stars flickered a losing battle, their waning light a pallid display in the face of the brilliant noise just below the horizon.

I knew how those poor, pathetic stars felt. At thirty-nine and counting, I was forty years younger than Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois, yet I always felt comparatively little and weak in the presence of her burning energy.

Madame’s dawn phone call may have seemed odd, but ever since her husband had passed away six months before, her vigilance with the Blend had grown keener, almost obsessive. She’d begun ringing me about everything that had gone wrong or been mishandled—in the greatest of detail, and at the oddest hours.

“Do you know what that conniving boob did?” Madame asked. “ Do you?”

At last, a moment where I was expected to respond. “Uh. No,” I said.

“He had the gall to actually sell the plaque—the Village Blend plaque!—to a roving antiques agent!”

I grimaced. A part of me felt sorry for the poor bastard who’d become the latest in a long string of hired—and fired—Blend managers. Lord, if Flaste had sold that plaque, he was an utter moron.

From the day it opened in 1895, the Village Blend’s only signage has been that brass plaque, engraved with simple black lettering: FRESH ROASTED COFFEE SERVED DAILY. “And that is the way it should be,” Madame had always insisted. No lights, no awning, no vulgar oversized neon sign. Just the old plaque. Subtle. Gracious. Like a gentlewoman. Elegant, sophisticated, never calling attention to herself, simply drawing people closer with her regal air and fetching bouquet.

Situated on a quiet corner of Hudson Street, in the first two floors of a four-story red brick townhouse, the Blend had been sending her rich, earthy aroma of freshly brewed coffee into the winding lanes of Greenwich Village for over one hundred years. The historic streets surrounding the place had once felt the footsteps of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, e.e. cummings, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Albee, Jackson Pollack, and countless musicians, poets, painters, and politicians who’d influenced American and world culture.

Within a few blocks sat the Commerce Street home where Washington Irving wrote Sleepy Hollow ; the historic church of St. Luke in the Field, whose founding vestryman, Clement Moore, composed ’Twas the Night Before Christmas ; and the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater, which was started in the 1920s by a group that included poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and decades later employed a young usher by the name of Barbra Streisand.

In more recent years, film, theater, and television stars had patronized the Blend, along with novelists, reporters, musicians, and fashion designers. Fortune holders as well as fortune hunters and most every famous resident of the Village had at one time or another stopped by for a famous Blend cup.

The coffeehouse had been a part of the area’s history—through good times and bad. And the sign wasn’t just a sign. It was practically a holy relic. Every manager of the Blend soon understood that correctly displaying the thing was less a matter of nostalgia than job security.

“I not only fired him, I made certain he was visited at one A.M. by two of New York’s Finest.”

Madame never did suffer fools gladly.

If anyone knew this fact, I did. For almost ten years, between the ages of twenty and thirty, I’d worked as the manager of Madame’s beloved Blend. (She maintains I was the “absolute best.”) Consequently, I got to know my former employer as well as my own mother (that is, if I had known my mother—she had left me and my father before my seventh birthday, but that’s another story). Anyway, even after I’d quit the Blend, we’d remained close.

“I’m curious,” I said after an enormous yawn. “What did Flaste get for the sign?”

“You know, that’s rather interesting. He sold it for nine hundred and seventy dollars, which was lucky for him, according to the officers who arrested him.”

“Doesn’t sound lucky.”

“It was thirty dollars under a thousand, you see.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, my dear, theft of one thousand dollars is a Class E felony. So the officers were forced to book him only on a petit larceny charge, a mere misdemeanor. Consequently, Moffat ‘walked’—as the policemen put it—after an appearance in night court.”