Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

I’m too old to have the kind of fight where you give your lover an ultimatum and break up, but I was glad we’d postponed any decision on living together.

Marcena had stayed away on Saturday night, but returned the day after, sleek as a well-fed tabby, exuberant about her twenty-four hours with Romeo Czernin. She’d arrived at Morrell’s just as I was putting a bowl of pasta on the table, burbling about what she’d seen and learned on the South Side. When she exclaimed how super it was to drive such an enormous truck, Morrell asked how it compared with the time she managed to get a tank through Vukovar to Cerska in Bosnia.

“Oh, my God, what a time we had that night, didn’t we?” she laughed, turning to me. “It would have been right up your alley, Vic. We stayed long past our welcome and our driver had disappeared. We thought it might be our last night on Earth until we found one of Milosevic’s tanks, abandoned but still running-fortunately, since I don’t know how you turn one of those things on-and I somehow managed to drive the bloody thing all the way to the border.”

I smiled back at her-it was indeed the kind of thing I’d have done, with her enthusiasm, too. I felt that twinge of envy, country mouse with city mouse. My home adventures weren’t tame, exactly, but nothing I’d done compared to driving a tank through a war zone.

Morrell gave an almost invisible sigh of relief at seeing Marcena and me in tune for a change. “So how did the semi compare with the tank?”

“Oh, an eighteen-wheeler wasn’t nearly as exciting-no one was shooting at us-although Bron tells me it has happened. But it’s tricky to drive; he wouldn’t let me take it out of the parking lot, and, after I’d almost demolished some kind of hut, I had to agree he was right.”

Bron. That was his real name; I hadn’t been able to come up with it. I asked if the Czernins had put her up for the night; I was wondering how April Czernin’s hero worship of the English journalist would survive if she knew her father were sleeping with Marcena.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said airily.

“You spend the night in the semi’s cab?” I asked. “These modern trucks sometimes almost have little apartments built into them.”

She flashed a provocative smile. “As you guessed, Vic, as you guessed.”

“You think you have a story there?” Morrell interposed quickly.

“My God, yes.” She ran her fingers through her thick hair, exclaiming that Bron was the key to an authentic American experience. “I mean, everything comes together, not exactly through him, but around him, anyway: the squalor, the heartache of these girls imagining that their basketball may get them out of the neighborhood, the school itself, and then Bron Czernin’s story-truck driver trying to support a family on those wages. His wife works, too; she’s a clerk of some kind at By-Smart. My next step is his firm, By-Smart, I mean, the firm he drives for. One knows about them in a vague way, of course: they’ve been making European retailers shake in their boots since they launched their transatlantic offensive three years ago. But I didn’t realize the head office was right here in Chicago, or at least in one of the suburbs. Rolling-something. Fields, I think.”

“ Rolling Meadows,” I said.

“That’s right. Bron tells me old Mr. Bysen is incredibly pious, and that at headquarters the day starts with a prayer service. Can you imagine? It’s utterly Victorian. I’m dying to see it, so I’m trying to organize an interview up there.”

“Maybe I should come with you.” I explained my efforts to enlist the company as a sponsor for the team. “Billy the Kid might get us in to meet his grampa.”

She flashed her enthusiastic smile at me. “Oh, Vic, super if you can manage it.”

We’d ended the evening still in relative harmony, which was a mercy, but I still didn’t sleep well. I slipped out of Morrell’s place early this morning, while he was still asleep, so I could drive to my own home and give the dogs a long run before my day started: today would take me down to coach again at Bertha Palmer, and I had promised Josie Dorrado to talk to her mother after practice.

The dogs and I ran all the way down to Oak Street and back, about seven miles. All of us needed the workout, and I thought I was feeling a lot better until Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor, told me I was looking seedy.

“Thought with Morrell coming home, you’d perk up, doll, but you’re looking worse than ever. Don’t go tearing off to your office now without eating a proper breakfast.”

I assured him I was fine, truly fine, now that Morrell was home and mending well, that my current overload was temporary until I found a real coach for the girls at Bertha Palmer.

“And whatcha doing about that, doll? You got anyone lined up?”

“I’ve put out a few feelers,” I said defensively. Besides meeting with Patrick Grobian at By-Smart, I had talked to the women I play Saturday pickup games with and to someone I know who runs a volunteer program for girls at the park district. So far, I’d come up empty, but if Billy the Kid could pry some bucks loose from Grampa one of my contacts might become more enthusiastic.

I fled the apartment before Mr. Contreras got himself revved into a high enough gear to keep me for another hour, promising over my shoulder that I’d eat breakfast, really. After all, my family motto is never skip a meal. Right underneath the Warshawski coat of arms-a knife and fork crossed over a dinner plate.

Privately, I was affronted at being told I looked bad. When I got into my car, I studied my face in the rearview mirror. Seedy, indeed: I was merely interestingly haggard, my lack of sleep making my cheekbones jut out like an anorexic runway model’s. In lieu of eight hours in bed, all I needed was a good concealer and some foundation, although not when I was going to spend two hours with sixteen teenagers on a basketball court.

“Morrell thinks I’m beautiful,” I grumbled out loud, even if Marcena Love is there in front of him right now, suave and perfectly groomed, probably had her makeup on just so when she commandeered the tank and headed for the border. I snapped my seat belt in hard enough to pinch my thumb, and made a rough U-turn into traffic. When I get my turn to hijack a tank, I’ll put on fresh lipstick, too.

I stopped at a diner for scrambled eggs, stopped at a coffee bar for a double espresso, and reached my office by ten. I concentrated on SEC filings and checked arrest records around the country for a man one of my clients was looking to hire. For the first time in a week, I actually managed to stay focused on my real work, completing three projects and even sending out the invoices.

I ruined my better mood by trying to phone Morrell while I waited at a light on Eighty-seventh Street and only reaching his answering machine. He had probably gone to the botanic gardens in Glencoe with Marcena; they’d talked about it last night. I had no problem with that whatsoever. It was great that he was feeling well enough to be up and about. But the idea added to the ferocity with which I stomped on Celine and April at the start of practice.

The team kept quiet for about five minutes, barring the usual jostling and the mutterings that they couldn’t do it, the exercises were too hard, Coach McFarlane never made them do this.

Celine, who seemed primed for mischief today, broke the silence by asking if I knew Romeo and Juliet. She was standing on her left leg and pulled her right leg straight over her head by the heel. She had extraordinary flexibility; even when she was driving me to the brink of pounding her, she could transfix me by the fluid beauty of her movements.

“You mean, the civil war that makes two star-crossed lovers take their life?” I said cautiously, wondering where this was going. “Not by heart.”