Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

“To ask me why I’d stopped looking for his father.” Ines stepped back, as if balance had deserted her. “I told him he’d have to talk to Nina about that. Or to you.” She puffed on her cigarette and shook her head.

“I am sorry,” she said softly. “Nina should not have… It was a mistake to say that to Guillermo.”

“Maybe you should tell her.”

Ines stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray and picked up her glass and drank half of what was in it. Her laugh was short and unpleasant. “Perhaps you have noticed that Nina is a difficult person to tell things.”

“If not you, then who?”

She shook her head. “It is complicated.”

“Apparently.”

Ines looked at me sharply. “I can do some things for Guillermo, but I am not his parent. I could teach him to use the toilet and to throw a ball. I could show him how to ride a bicycle. I can be sure I am here when he arrives from school, so he does not come to an empty apartment. I can know when he is late… or when he is truant. Those things I can do, detective, but I am not his mother, and I cannot tell his mother what is best for him. On some topics, my opinions are irrelevant.” Her lovely oval face sagged and she drank from her wineglass again. “Do you have children?”

“No.”

“Then you cannot know the complications,” she said, and smiled bitterly. “Perhaps neither one of us can.”

The wineglass was empty and Ines’s eyes were clouded. She leaned heavily on the counter and rested her head on her arms. I saw the razor-straight part in her black hair and I saw her shoulders quiver. There was no traffic in the street beyond the big windows, and it was very quiet in the gallery. There was a new exhibit hanging- massive canvases with large, vaguely floral shapes in deep purples and reds and pinks- and I stood and looked at them while I waited for Ines to raise her head. After a couple of minutes she did.

“I must check on him now,” she said. She took her heavy key ring from the counter, and I followed her to the street. She locked the glass doors and looked at me. “You should not be here when Nina gets home.”

Peter Spiegelman

JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home

I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, waiting for word from Neary and thinking about Billy. I thought about the tension in his narrow frame as he looked down from the steps of my building, and of the hurt and confusion etched around his eyes. I remembered what he’d said about his mother, and how, when he knew he’d said too much, he’d made excuses for her and looked to me for agreement. I recalled Ines’s advice to him- to simply fade away- and I clenched my fists. I thought about parents and children, and about how kids survive and at what price. I thought and I waited, but no answers came to me and Neary never called.

Jane appeared late Monday night, bleary-eyed and subdued, and bearing Indian food. She hung her suit jacket on a chair and kicked off her shoes, and we ate mostly in silence. When she did speak it was in angry fragments about her deal, which had hit an eleventh-hour snag over her participation in the company after its sale. The buyers wanted her to run things for two more years, but Jane wasn’t interested. They were insistent and threatening to make it a deal-breaker; Jane was getting mad.

“I don’t come with the copier and the paper clips,” she muttered over her tandoori. “I’m not a piece of fucking office furniture.” She got tired of talking about it halfway through dinner and flicked on the television. She surfed through the channels and leafed angrily through the pages of another fat travel magazine and finished her meal in silence. I carried the trash to the chute down the hall, and when I got back Jane was sitting on the sofa. The travel magazine was in her lap and the TV was off. She was staring at me.

“So, have you figured out what you want to do about this vacation thing yet?” she asked. Her words were quick and taut, as if she’d had too much coffee, and her eyes- though tired in her tired face- were looking for something. Like a fight.

“What do you mean?”

“You said there was a chance your client might reconsider over the weekend- that your job might come back. Are you still waiting for that to happen, or has something else come along?”

I sighed. “Is this really the best time? Don’t you want to get some sleep?”

“Sleep’s overrated,” Jane snorted. “I just want to know where I stand with this trip. How much time can that take?”

I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. I drank some of it and cleared my throat and looked at her over the counter. “We’ve talked about this. We-”

“No, we haven’t. We’ve talked around it- for weeks now. Now I actually want to talk about it.” Her dark eyes narrowed and color rose in her face. “Did your job come back?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s nice and direct,” she said. Her laugh was short. “Is there an explanation to go with that?”

“Sachs hasn’t changed her mind, but there was a breakin at Pace-Loyette over the weekend, in Danes’s office. I’m looking into that.”

“They hired you?”

“Not exactly.”

Jane’s brows came together. “Has anyone hired you?”

“I told Irene Pratt I’d look into it. And I told Nina’s kid, Billy, that I’d keep looking for his father.”

“So they’re your clients now?”

“It’s more of a pro bono thing.”

Jane shook her head. A tiny smile, equal parts incredulous and bitter, played on her perfect lips. “Pro bono is right. The question is: good for who, them or you?”

“They need-”

“What do you need, John? What is it that you want?”

I put my glass down. “I’ve told you, I don’t think a trip is a bad idea, I just-”

“I’m not talking about the trip anymore,” Jane said. The silence afterward was ringing.

“I was starting to suspect that,” I said, after a while.

Jane’s face darkened. “Don’t be funny,” she said quietly. “Not now.”

“What do you want me to say, Jane?”

Jane looked down at her stockinged feet for a while. Then she raised her head and locked her eyes on mine. “You can say what it is we’re doing here, for starters. You can tell me what this is supposed to be. Whether it’s just something convenient, that fits into the time you can’t fill up with work, or… something else.” Jane’s fingers were white at the edges of the magazine, and a pulse was beating quickly on her neck.

“I’ve never thought of this as just handy,” I said softly.

She took a deep breath and dragged a hand through her cropped hair. “And was there some way I was supposed to know that? Was there a sign I missed? Maybe it’s the lack of sleep- or maybe I’m just no good at parsing the oblique stuff- because the only signal I get from you says convenience.”

I drank some more water, but it didn’t relieve the churning in my gut. My ears were full of a rushing sound. “Convenience is a two-way street,” I said.

Jane’s mouth tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that your work is important to you, and you like your life organized a certain way, and all of this is pretty convenient for you too. It fits nicely into what little free time you give yourself. It’s close to home and to the office, and-”

“You really think that’s why I’m here, because of… geography?” she asked. Her magazine had fallen to the floor but she didn’t seem to notice. Her face was very still.

I shrugged. “I think we’re alike, Jane. Both of us like things neat, and we like them on our own terms.”

Jane looked at me, and after a while she sighed. “I think that’s facile bullshit,” she said. “And what’s more, I think you know it.” She went to the table and picked up her jacket and slipped her feet into her shoes. “I think you know there’s a difference between being dedicated to your work and hiding inside it. And an even bigger difference between being self-sufficient and… whatever it is that you are.”