James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“What?” I couldn’t muster anything more verbose.

“I… uh…” she started, stopped, bit her lip. She clutched a large leather clutch in front of her, larger than a purse. “I was just listening to what you said to that man back there, about God… I was wondering if you’d read the cards for me.”

“Not here.” I returned to gathering my things, packing them away into the bag which contained my life. “Too many whackjobs.”

“I was going to suggest we go somewhere more private.” As she kept speaking, I was finally able to make out the accent under her English. The inflection of the ‘r’, the difficulty with ‘w’ and ‘-ng’. My hackles rose.

“ U menya net chastnogo doma. ” I said in Russian. “I don’t have anywhere more private.”

Her expression flickered, and I knew I had bitten her in just the right place. But then, she smiled, and when she spoke, it was with the enthusiastic relief of someone who hadn’t heard their mother tongue in some time. Her accent was provincial. “You speak Russian?”

“Russian is my mother tongue. One of them.”

She pressed her lips together for a moment, smiled, and shrugged her shoulders in what I supposed was an expression of pleasure. “It’s strange how things work out sometimes. Come on, we can just go to a McDonald’s or something… no one else will be able to hear us. It’s got booths.”

“There are better diners around here.” McDonald’s didn’t count as ‘food’ by any definition of the word. “Kapinsky’s, on the corner of 8th and 53rd.”

“Sounds good.” Her face suffused with color: cheeks flushing, eyes flashing before they hardened. “I’ll be blunt, though. Are you for real? Like, are you any good at this?”

I glanced up at her. “I used to be better.”

“Sounds like there’s a story in that.” She frowned slightly, and I realized I’d just undersold myself. Oh well.

I heaved my bag up with a tired sigh I didn’t have to fake. “There is. A long, difficult tale of a man facing insurmountable odds against a faceless organization. Shall we go?” I was eager to get away, before the cops arrived. Manhattan was a pig-sty.

The girl smiled again. If I’d been of a mind, I would have described her as ‘cute’. Not beautiful – she was cute in the short-limbed, fluffy way that long-haired kittens and small dogs were cute. “Okay. Lead the way.”

That was an unusual thing for a young lady to say to a bum, but perhaps I looked more noble than I really was. Some kind of Dickensian charisma? We headed off together, me with my bag over one shoulder, her with her enormous clutch bumping into everyone on her right hand side as she passed them.

This girl could have been one of Nic’s spies. The accent in her Russian marked her as being from the far West of the country: Vladivostok, or maybe even the Aleutian Islands. She was at least part Indigenous and too old to be a student, though her bag was clearly full of books. The silver-wrought eagle feather badge and the silver pen with a piece of turquoise sticking out of her pocket were bohemian enough to help place her. The natural hair, flat Mary Janes, and brown suit look was common to only a few workplace cultures in this part of town. Businesswomen tended to wear darker colors, bigger shoulders, and higher heels. This girl expected to spend a lot of time on her feet. Her shoes were old, but not worn, the soles scuffed, corners rounded. She did stand a lot – indoors – and she smelled like paper and ink, which narrowed her places of work to libraries, archives, schools… that sort of thing.

“So, what’s your name?” She asked me when we were nearly at the deli.

That was a good question. It still wasn’t prudent to give my real name to anyone, especially mysterious Russian-speaking young women with enigmatic problems, so I decided to stick with the nickname I’d been using in the Bronx. “Rex.”

“Rex? That’s not a Russian name.”

“I’m Ukrainian. And it’s a good name for a dog.” I looked aside at her, tiredly taking in details. “You work at a museum? A library or something?”

“There’s… how did you know that?” Her eyes widened. Whatever she was, she wasn’t ever going to be winning at poker. If she was a honey pot sent by the Organizatsiya to find me, she was terrible… or especially good. It was sometimes hard to tell the worst from the best. The month before, a certain petite blond lawyer had successfully penetrated my cynicism, only to reveal herself as a serial-killing warlock on the hunt for a Gift Horse. MY Gift Horse.

“A month ago, that wouldn’t have been phrased as a question. Like I said, I am not as good as I was, but I still seem to possess some small gift.”

“I’ll say.” She made a face, popping her lips. “Well, I’m Talya. Talya Karzan. So, where do you think I work?”

“I’d hesitate to say the Museum of the American Indian,” I replied. “But I could be wrong.”

Judging by her expression, I was clearly correct. She giggled nervously. “Okay… You’re really good. Oh my goodness, I’m all nervous now. How is it… well, I don’t mean to be rude, but how come you’re out here? You could be a detective or something, instead of…” she struggled briefly to find a polite way of saying it. “Without a home.”

Perish the thought. “I prefer to think of myself as ‘between homes’, rather than ‘homeless’.”

“Are you a Veteran?”

I shook my head. Though now that I thought about it, it would be a good cover story, if I had to make one up in the future. When we reached the door of Kapinsky’s, I held it for her, and she smiled prettily as we went inside.

Kapinsky’s was an old Jewish corner deli, painfully reminiscent of Mariya’s tea shop in appearance, but far less friendly. There was still a certain comfort to be found in Kosher food. My mother’s cooking was the only reliably good memory I had of her. The counter sheltered a cornucopia of preserved meats and fish. After weeks of skulking on the burnt out fringes of the Bronx, it smelled intense, a real savory salt burn that made my mouth water.

“What do you want?” Talya looked at me enquiringly.

‘Everything in the case’ was not an appropriate response. Neither was ‘anything’. I thought, glancing over the menu in agitation. “Two toasted everything bagels with lox and cheese. Salad and coffee, black. As strong as they can make it.”

We took a table, and I set my deck of cards down by my hand while we waited. Conversation was too much to deal with after having been spat on, but Talya seemed comfortable with silence. I tried to be serene for her sake, but I wasn’t used to suppressing my rage this way. A guy had spat on me, and I hadn’t been able to stab him. In times past, I had an outlet for anger in the course of my job. Without the option to kill, rage boiled and curled, pushed against my mouth and hands, and when it found no exit, it simply roiled and grew deep within the pit of my belly. It bothered me. Maybe I’d go out and find Reptile Guy’s car and wait until he got in. I could pour gasoline in the cabin, set it alight. He wanted his God that bad… I’d send him off as a burnt offering.

“Hey, Rex? Are you okay?”

I broke out of the spiral of brooding to glance at her. Talya’s eyes were wide, her head cocked to one side.

“Just tired,” I said. “The crazy guy took the wind out of my sails.”

“He was a Voicer, I think. They hold their services in the Hammerstein Room. That guy was probably on his way to their big service.”

“He was quoting a party line?” I frowned, disconcerted. “What is this, some kind of cult?”

Talya smiled. “Do you consider Evangelical megachurches to be a cult?”