Sam Thompson - Communion Town

‘I didn’t know how else to find you,’ you said. ‘You never pick up the phone.’

My scowl sank deeper. I should have told you to get the hell out of my office but I said nothing. You were incongruous in the sedimented dinge of the room, reaching into your valise.

‘Mind if I smoke?’

I grunted and lit up one of my own.

You raised your chin to me with the unlit cigarette balanced between your lips. Glowering, I tossed my matchbook into the desk debris between us. You wore a private face as you tore a match out and struck it.

‘You don’t change, do you … Hal.’

With your eyes slitted against the smoke, you dropped the matchbook into your valise. That valise, that brand of cigarettes, that gesture, that curl, I couldn’t shake the sense I’d seen them before, and often. But not in this town. I gave up on my glower and tried stringing a sentence together instead.

‘You don’t know me, lady.’

You considered this.

‘Maybe not. But I can imagine you.’

And with that, all at once, I was too tired. I was a body map of insults that no one needed to see.

‘Look, miss. I don’t know you and I got no interest in what you have to say about me. Now either you’re here on business or you were just leaving.’

Against the window you were in silhouette, the daylight eating into your edges. You turned your head to me and smoke bloomed.

‘I have a job for you, Hal Moody.’ You reached without hesitation, without even looking, into the heaped desktop, and stubbed your half-smoked cigarette out in the chipped coffee cup that served me for an ashtray. ‘I need you to search for a missing person.’

‘That’s more like it,’ I said. ‘Take a seat.’

Before I knew it, I’d gestured for you to sit back down in my chair, the big old bucket-seat creaker behind the desk. For all the world as if I was going to line myself up on the straight-backed broken-legged number I keep so clients won’t stay any longer than they have to. But you didn’t sit. You stayed dark against the bright pane and chuckled softly to yourself.

‘Who are you looking for?’ I blurted.

‘I’m not the one searching, Mr Moody.’

You picked your way around the desk and looked up at me. You inspected my necktie, a no-nonsense job in navy silk with dark red diamonds. Then you turned your attention to my shoes, which, I was suddenly aware, needed to be polished, or possibly thrown in a skip. One of them had hairy brown parcel string instead of a lace.

Your finger traced my lapel, absent-minded. It was well done. It was as if you recognised my jacket from long ago, like maybe you’d known it well in your childhood, and it seemed for a moment this was the only reason you were here.

‘Time is strange,’ you said, almost too soft for me to catch. Then you came back to yourself, or you seemed to, and you twitched my lapels straight.

‘You’re not going to like it,’ you said, ‘but this is the story, so you’d better listen. The missing person — I can’t tell you anything about her, nothing, no back story. I can’t tell you where to start looking. All I can tell you is this. First, she isn’t missing, not yet. And second, there’s no way you’re ever going to find her. But, Hal, I need you to search.’

This wasn’t much better than talking to the Cherubs. ‘Give me the facts,’ I growled. ‘Who is this frill?’

Your hand wavered. You hesitated like you weren’t sure which answer you wanted to give. Then you said:

‘It’s me.’

6. Blue Eyes and Greenbacks

With that the whole thing became clear to me. Became quite routine. It’s not like I get many clients, but when I get them, that’s how it goes, these days, nine times in ten, more when it’s a dame we’re talking about. It’s no mystery, nothing you could call a case. It’s some private investigation of her own, a tale or fantasy with herself at the centre and who knows what shadows and worries webbing out in all directions to make up the rest of the thing. Not that it could make sense to anyone else, not that it’s the expression of anything rational, but at some point the moist finds what she really needs is a schlub to join in and play along. So she comes to me and I charge her eighty a day plus expenses. I ask the right questions and look like I’m listening to the answers, she gets what she needs, I get what I need, everybody’s happy.

So with zero surprise I heard out what you had to say. You yourself were the missing person in your story, it was you I was supposed to find. I gave a practised professional nod. Sure, sure, you were here now, but there was no doubt you’d soon be spirited away. No, you couldn’t tell me why or how you expected to vanish, who it was you were afraid of. My job was simple: meet you first thing tomorrow morning. You picked a scrap of paper off my desk, scribbled an address, folded it and passed it over between two fingertips.

‘Seven a.m. sharp,’ you said.

‘And what am I doing at seven a.m. at —’ I glanced at the paper ‘— eleven-seventy-four Lorenz? I gotta know if I’m walking into something here.’

‘You’ll be fine. Just be there. I need you watching closely.’

The way you made it sound, you were liable to evaporate right into the overbaked air. Not that you seemed too concerned.

‘Once I’m gone, Hal, you have to keep looking for me. Promise.’

You dropped your chin and gazed up at me so your eyes were a pair of wells sunk into limpid darkness. I teetered over them, heels on the brink.

‘Wait just a minute,’ I said. And I said the word Don Cherub had spoken in Meaney’s — said it as a question. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’

You said nothing, kept your eyes raised to me.

‘I thought so,’ I said. I shook my head and strode the length of the office, by which I mean I took a single reckless step before barking my shin. ‘You’ve already given me plenty of grief today. You’re the kind makes as much trouble as the nearest sucker lets her. And I can’t think of one good reason why I should get involved.’

You raised an eyebrow. Then the other.

‘Yeah, okay, I got a reason,’ I said. ‘Ninety a day plus expenses, that’s what. Call it a hundred if I’m getting up in the middle of the goddamn night. First week’s payable in advance.’

You shrugged. Then, casually, you swept half the junk off my desk to the floor. From your valise you brought out a fistful of something like specie, but it was no currency I recognised: they looked like small gold coins from two thousand years ago, rubbed into smooth soft-edged ovals, worn as thin as seashell shards in the bed of a river. You heaped a handful on the desk, then another, then more. I lifted one of the discs; it had a buttery gleam, and a density to it in spite of being so delicate.

‘I take cash,’ I said.

‘This is better, the way things are.’

I couldn’t disagree. I held the disc up to the light. No markings were legible. The fine-veined tracery across the surface had no pattern or direction I could make out. I tried it between my teeth. I looked at the pile on the desk. There was a lot.

‘Do we have an agreement, Mr Moody?’

I’d have liked to pause for an internal struggle, but what was the use? It wasn’t much to do with the gold. The answer to the question had been out of doubt since the moment you walked through the door of my office and set yourself to wait in my chair.

You smiled like you knew that too. But along with the triumph you looked to be genuinely pleased for me. You came close again and your hand strayed up to brush something off my lapel. You leaned in, your lips not quite touching my ear.

‘Take care of yourself,’ you murmured, as if you were passing on a secret. You walked out of my office, and, just before you shut the door, I’d swear you granted a slow glimpse of one marble-smooth, masterly turned ankle, bound in its narrow black strap. And then you were gone.