The white dining room was empty except for two old men wearing pressed seersucker jackets and striped bow ties. They ate the same pumpkin-colored soup, and might have been brothers except that they sat wrapped in their own silence at tables far removed from each other. The maître d’, a tall Frenchman dressed in an expensive gray three-piece, led Wilson and the woman through the dining room onto a back patio set with five small tables and planted with rosebushes. In his suit the waiter looked more like a businessman or a lawyer than someone who worked in a restaurant.
“Usually, we have a dress code here,” he said. “That is why I sit you on the patio, O.K.?”
He left them alone with the menus and the wine list. A small fountain plashed quietly from just inside. Robins had built a nest in the ivy up the wall of the tenement building opposite. Directly across from Wilson, one of those terra-cotta sunburst masks from Mexico was cemented into the old brick. It stared at him with hollow Mexican eyes.
The young woman licked her chapped lips and read the menu. The descriptions were in French, and everything was expensive. She belonged here in the sun, it seemed to Wilson, not in the grim dreariness of the store amidst shrunken heads and books about raising the dead and conjuring demons.
“This place isn’t cheap,” Wilson said.
“Then let’s just get something light,” the young woman said, closing the menu. “A salad, soup. French bread and cheese.”
“Sounds good,” Wilson said.
“And a bottle of wine.”
“I don’t know much about wine,” he said.
“Leave it to me.”
She glanced at the wine list and closed it with a quick snap. When she ordered, Wilson felt a wicked thrill. He thought of Andrea at the office peering at the small screen of her laptop, going over the previous day’s market closings, spending hours on conference calls to the home office in Denver, as around her eyes those imperceptible lines deepened each day, her forehead worried with stress, her mouth tightened into a permanent frown.
The wine waiter brought an ’82 Mont Orgeuil Côtes du Rhône; then the first food waiter brought the bread and the second food waiter brought the cheese. It was one of those restaurants where they have a half dozen waiters for every table.
The young woman’s name was Cricket.
“Like the bug?” Wilson asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s your real name?”
“Susan,” she said. “But people call me Cricket.”
Beneath the mane of hair, Wilson noticed heavy gold pendant earrings, set with pearls and rubies. They looked Spanish and very old and they dangled toward the table as she leaned forward to eat. She was working at the occult store as a favor to a friend and to make a little money, she said.
“Cauldron central, that’s not really me. I know a little bit about the stuff, and I guess I keep an open mind. Still, you should see the characters that come in off the street. Look like they crawled out from under a rock.”
Wilson felt hot behind the ears.
“No, I don’t mean you, honey,” Cricket said. “You seem nice and normal, just a guy with a lot of worries.”
“How can you tell?”
Cricket shrugged. “In any case, I’m waiting for a ship.”
“Are you in the merchant marine?”
“No, I crew on private yachts. I do a little navigating, take care of the charts. I keep the deckhands in line.”
“I knew it,” Wilson said. “You’re a sailor.”
“You could say that,” Cricket said. “I’ve circumnavigated the globe, like Magellan.”
“Magellan didn’t make it,” Wilson said. “The natives got him in the Philippines.”
“You’re gloomy,” Cricket said.
“I know.”
A third food waiter brought French country salads of endive and bacon with nuggets of goat cheese. They finished the salads quickly, then the wine a few minutes later, and Cricket signaled the wine waiter and ordered another bottle without asking Wilson. It was a ’77 Château Maronne, a white Burgundy with an impressive gold-rimmed label, that the wine waiter brought out in a bucket of ice.
“This story will interest you because of your father,” Cricket said, filling up Wilson’s glass.
“My father?” Wilson said.
“He was a gambler, right?”
Wilson shrugged.
As they drank and nibbled at the last of the bread, Cricket told Wilson about growing up in the Palmetto Keys, a small cluster of egg-shaped islands, mostly sand and shells and a few live oaks, fifty miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico.
“There’s a little town called St. George on Outer Key,” she said. “That’s where I was born. My father owned a hotel and a charter boat service there, which made him about the only man around with a steady job that didn’t have anything to do with gambling. I hear tourism is the thing now. In those days, before they changed the law, it was gambling. The keys are owned half by Florida and half by Alabama. For years, on the Alabama side, high-stakes private poker games were legal. Maybe your father played down there.”
“He preferred the horses,” Wilson said.
“In any case, you could gamble for millions of dollars as long as you didn’t run a casino,” Cricket said, “which meant you didn’t employ anybody and you did it out of your own house—and about every weekend, gangster types with big wads of cash would come down from places like New Orleans and Miami, and even Chicago or New York, and there would be these big poker games in the fancy private houses along the lagoon on the leeward side. After my parents got divorced, my father spent a lot of time over there with one of the local gamblers called Johnny Mazep, who ran a high-stakes game every Sunday from September to May.
“One night, just before Christmas when I was about seven years old, my father showed up drunk in the middle of the night at my window. He cut the screen out with a pocketknife, and wrapped me in a sweater and put me in his outboard. We took the Palmetto Passage between Outer and Inner Key, and I remember the smell of diesel and my father’s cigarette and the sky black as ink, no stars, nothing.
“We tied up at Mazep’s dock and went into the place, a garish pink bungalow the size of a parking garage. In the living room there were about twenty-five guys in suits, all with guns drawn. The scene was very tense. In an inflatable kiddie pool on the floor was all this money—about two million dollars in cash, my father told me later—all of it riding on a single cut of the cards between Mazep and some big shot from Chicago. They wanted somebody totally disinterested to cut the cards, and they couldn’t find anybody there, so my father went and got me.
“I was scared shitless, shaking like a leaf, but I didn’t cry. They opened up a new pack. I can still hear the sound of the cellophane, and I can still smell the beer and body odor and whiskey and their big gangster cigars. I cut the cards. It was the king of hearts. They had bet high-low, Mazep low, the big shot high. Johnny Mazep lost everything. His wife, who was Brazilian and always a little crazy anyway, committed suicide. Two months later, he sold his house and left the Palmettos for good, and his family had been there for two hundred years, first as wreckers and privateers, then smugglers and gamblers. Always something like that.
“The big shot from Chicago gave me four five-hundred-dollar bills for cutting the cards for him. I kept them folded up tight in my hand all the way home in the outboard, the moon up and shining on the dark water. In the morning my mother found the screen cut and the two thousand dollars under my pillow. I told her the tooth fairy came during the night and left the money. ‘Mighty expensive tooth,’ she said, and she fixed the screen and put the money in a savings account for me and didn’t say anything else. As soon as I could, about ten years later, I took that money out of the bank, and I went to sea and I haven’t been back to the Palmettos since.”
The second bottle of wine was almost empty now. Little bits of cork floated in the inch or so of pale yellow liquid at the bottom. Wilson felt fine. He poured the last few drops into Cricket’s glass. When she brought the glass to her lips, he noticed with a start that her hands were rough and broken nailed, work scarred, hard looking. They didn’t seem to go with the coppery hair and the green eyes the color of tropic shallows full of fish and coral. Cricket caught Wilson looking at her hands, flushed a little, and hid them quickly under the tablecloth.
“Why have you stayed away from your home for so long?” Wilson said to cover the awkwardness.
Cricket shrugged, her hair glinting in the sunlight. “I prefer the sea,” she said. “It’s so changeable, one minute stormy, the next flat as a plate. It’s supposed to be that way, so you’re ready for whatever happens. On land we have this illusion of stability. But that’s a big lie; everything can ride on the single turn of a card. At least at sea you know where you stand. I’ll tell you what a sailor is, a sailor—”
But she was interrupted by the maître d’ in the suit, who stepped up and proffered the bill on a glossy black tray.
“L’addition,” he said with the gravity of a cardinal pronouncing a blessing.
“How much is it?” Cricket said.
Wilson waved her away. “On me,” he said.
It came to $178.29, not including tax and tip—more than his food budget for the entire month. “Shit, just for soup and salad … I guess it’s the wine.…” He checked the wine list and saw that the first bottle Cricket had ordered was listed at $65, the second at $78.
As he was fumbling with his credit card, she got up quickly. “Thanks for lunch,” she said. “Better get back to the store.”
Figuring out the tip, Wilson barely heard, and when he looked up, she was gone.