“Oh,” he said, warming his hands on the steaming mug. “I bet you’re a big help to Mommy.”
The girl nodded as she held a sticky marshmallow to Barbie’s lips for a second, then popped it into her own mouth. She picked up her cup and slurped another marshmallow. Her mother stared out the window, with her hands wrapped around an untasted mug of hot chocolate.
Rigger looked to see what held her attention and was startled to meet her eyes in the reflection of the glass. She watched him in the mirrored window, not shifting her gaze. He blinked and took up his cup.
“We gonna get a pet l’phant,” the little girl said to Rigger.
The woman looked at the girl, narrowing her eyes. The girl narrowed her eyes back at her.
Rigger tried to interpret this fragment of intercepted communications. Was it a secret that the girl wanted a pet and strangers shouldn’t be made aware of it? Was ‘pet elephant’ a code phrase for something forbidden, perhaps an exotic bird, or maybe a father? Whatever it was, Rigger envied their easy relationship.
“Hurry up with your chocolate, Mama,” her mother said. “We have to go.”
“So,” Rigger said, “you do cleaning work.”
“Wait, don’t tell me.” The caustic knife of her words formed with practiced precision and cut without qualm. “You just remembered your maid went on vacation.”
“No, I don’t have a maid.” He kept his voice soft in spite of her combative attitude.
Has life been so difficult for her that every man is a threat? Or perhaps a menace to something close to her? Why can’t she see she has nothing to fear from me?
“Then your apartment is suddenly very dirty.” It sounded like an accusation.
“As a matter of fact, I keep it fairly clean.” This exchange was wearing Rigger down and getting them nowhere.
“What, then?”
“I just wondered how much you charge?”
“All that the traffic will bear.” Her cold eye-lock never wavered, never weakened.
“Oh.”
“Isn’t that what you charge?”
“I don’t charge anything, since—”
“I guess you just live off the fat of the land.”
Rigger gave up. “I suppose so.”
He returned his gaze to the little face framed in yellow curls and smiled as the girl silently admonished Barbie about something she apparently said without asking the girl’s permission.
I wonder if her hair is naturally curly. If not, someone spent a lot of time on it. Unusual for street people.
The woman sipped her chocolate, licked her upper lip, then took a big drink. She followed Rigger’s gaze to her daughter, who tried to catch a marshmallow with her tongue.
Ten minutes later, outside Hannibal’s, Rigger watched the two of them walk away. The girl hung on to the bottom edge of the pea-jacket as the woman shoved her hands into the pockets. Only the Barbie doll, cradled against the girl’s shoulder, looked back at him. He waved goodbye to Barbie, sighed, and went the opposite way. As he walked toward the drug store, he took the doctor’s prescriptions from his coat pocket.
* * * * *
On the following Tuesday, the day after Christmas, Rigger walked the streets. He really had no reason to return to Hannibal’s Café; he just wanted to taste the chocolate again.
He caught his breath when he saw the two of them across the street from Hannibal’s, working the busy lunchtime crowd. They wore the same clothes as last week. He hustled through the traffic while they watched a gaggle of stockbrokers in pinstripes waddle by, half of them with cellphones grafted to their ears, hands attached. The rest of them had Bluetooth earbuds. All of them chattered a bit too loudly and waved their hands in the air, very much full of themselves.
“Hi there,” he said, coming up on their blind side.
The woman jerked her head around toward him, almost smiled, but then took on an expression that could have said, I was actually expecting someone else.
The child had a new sign, “Please help. Mommy lost job.” The girl’s face was stony as before, but her eyes welcomed him, and she turned Barbie his way. The doll gave him a blue-crayoned smile that wasn’t there last week.
He returned Barbie’s smile, then spoke to the mother. “How’s business?”
An urge to grab her shoulders to keep them from shrugging rose from his pectorals and tingled down to his hands, creating an awkward gesture. But she surprised him, and for an instant he thought he saw an unguarded sign of relief in her eyes.
“Not bad.” No shrug.
“You two had lunch?”
“Nope,” she said.
“I’m on my way to see what Hannibal has on today’s special. Wanna join me?”
She glanced down at the girl. “You hungry, Mama?”
The child nodded vigorously.
“Well, then, let’s go.”
Rigger stepped around the woman and picked up the girl before either of them could change their minds. She was light as a new kitten in his arms. Without hesitation, she put her arm around his neck and held on.
They threaded through the traffic, and he opened the door for the woman to precede him into the cafe.
The waitress told them the day’s special was liver, and Rigger noticed an expression of yuck on the child’s face. They ordered from the menu, and the waitress scurried away to the kitchen.
Rigger spoke to the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Rachel. I’m in the Bible, you know. This is Henry.” She held the grinning Barbie doll out to him.
“Hello, Henry.” He shook the outstretched plastic hand and felt the texture of her coral and rose pinafore—three doll-sizes too large. “I’m glad to meet you, and I must say, that’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing.”
Rachel stared at Henry, listening for a moment while adjusting the garment over an exposed shoulder. “She likes yours, too.”
Rigger studied the girl’s face. Rachel—Appearance – 10, Likability – 10, Attitude – 8, Usefulness – 2.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” the woman said, without warning.
Rigger and Rachel looked at her. So did Henry.
“We’ll clean your stupid apartment, but it’ll cost you fifty bucks.”
The girl and Henry looked at Rigger, expectant expressions on their faces.
He savored the moment, feeling some sort of perverse victory over the woman. Had he penetrated her icy facade and touched a warm current of femininity?
Street Woman; Appearance – 8, Likability – 1, Attitude – 0, Usefulness – 6.
“Sorry,” Rigger said, thinking he might persuade her to lighten her attitude. “My maid came back from vacation.”
“Let’s go, Rach.” She grabbed the girl’s arm, pushing her to the edge of booth.
“Wait.” He was no match for her. “Kidding. I was only kidding.” He reached for her wrist to keep them from leaving.
She glared at his hand, then wrenched away hers and settled back to her place. “Don’t fool with me, Rigger. I don’t play jokes.”
“All right, I’m sorry…” He stopped, confused for a moment. “I just wanted to see you smile.”
“I don’t do that either.”
He looked down to see Henry slowly turn her smiling face toward him.
“Okay,” he said. “No jokes, no smiles. I got it.”
The woman held her hand out to him, palm up.
“What?” he asked.
“Payment in advance.”
“Yeah, right…” He saw one eyebrow go up. “Okay, okay. Payment in advance. No jokes, no smiles.”
When his checkbook came out, she shook her head.
“American Express?” Rigger had reached a point where she was either going to take a joke or they were going to end this mercenary affair.
“Actually, I can do American Express.”
“Didn’t she say no jokes?” he asked Rachel, then looked the question at Henry. They both nodded.
“You have to add ten percent,” the woman said. “We do it at Punky’s Pawn Shop, over on Forty-third.”
“Seriously?”
“You don’t think a street woman can do business?”
“Oh, I think you’re a businesswoman all right. A very good businesswoman.”
He took some currency out of his wallet, riffling the new twenties to separate them. When he passed two twenties and a ten to her, he looked up to see the waitress glancing from the money to him to the woman.
She shrugged and asked, “Meatloaf?”
He made room for her to set the plate before him. She placed the chicken-fried steak in front of the woman, dropping it from a height that made an annoying clatter, but not quite enough to break the plate. Rachel got a hamburger with a side order of M&Ms, gently.
Henry sat down on the table, with her legs splayed out. She watched Rachel pick out three green candies. One went into Henry’s lap.
Rigger picked up his fork and stared at it as if he’d forgotten what he was going to do with it.
When did I tell her my name?
Chapter Three
Rigger’s apartment on Central Park East, facing Sheep Meadow.
Rigger roused himself from semi-paralysis and reached for his remote control to pause the Mozart. He hit the wrong button, bringing the TV to life.
A newscast blinked on. “…missing from her morning dance class.” A video of a hysterical mother pacing in front of an old redbrick building popped onto the screen. “No one, no one, especially Rudolf, my dumb-ass ex-husband, is supposed to pick up my daughter. I’ve told them and told them, he’s an imbecile, he’ll grab her and take off to Albuquerque or someplace. I bet he did it. I know the sonofa—”
The video of the woman abruptly changed to the contrite, chiseled face of a young news anchor with much-too-blue contact lenses. He squinted to read the teleprompter.
“However, the Tiny Tyke Academy’s spokesperson told our reporter that Samantha Ann Cramer wasn’t picked up at the school. They had no record of her arriving for her regular Wednesday morning bullet…” the man stopped and blinked at the camera. “Ah…uh…” he stammered, clearing his throat. “I mean ballet, her Wednesday morning ballet class. The mother insisted she had dropped off the four-year-old girl at nine a.m., as always, and watched her until she was inside the building. Meanwhile, police and child welfare authorities began—”
Rigger clicked off the TV when his doorbell chimed. He opened the door to see the familiar pea-jacket, Henry the Barbie doll, and sweet Irish eyes of Rachel.
“Come in, come in.” He stepped aside and waved them into his apartment, imitating the enthusiasm he wanted to feel.
When he closed the door, a fluffy ball of fur came bounding around a corner on the opposite side of the large living room. The puppy tripped on the red ribbon trailing from his neck, tumbled down the four carpeted steps, landed on his head, rolled end-over-end, and jumped to his feet. With tiny pink tongue flapping out the side of his mouth, he ran straight for the girl.
“L’phant!” she cried and ran behind the woman. He chased after her. Rachel dodged away. “L’phant, l’phant!” she squealed. “Save me.”
On the third time around, the woman grabbed the girl and held her up high. The puppy sat, panting, looking up at the child, still wanting to play.
“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” She didn’t give Rigger a chance to answer. “If I wanted her to have a dog, I’d buy her a dog. And it wouldn’t be a scruffy mutt like this one.” She shoved away the puppy with her foot.
Instead of being rebuffed, the dog took it as an invitation. He yipped happily, pouncing on the woman’s foot.
Rachel squirmed around to watch him.
“Who said it was for her?” Rigger asked.
“Oh, so it’s your dog?”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking for a long time I needed a watchdog.”
She blew out a breath through pursed lips and shoved away the puppy again. “You call that a watchdog?”
Rigger nodded.
“What’s his name, then?”
“I call him…um…” He glanced down at the playful tan and white half-spaniel. “Wolf. His name is Wolf.”
“Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’ll take your vicious watchdog named ‘Wolf’ and lock him in a closet or something, I’ll put Rachel down and get to work.”
“All right.” Rigger knelt down, swallowing his pain and moving as smoothly as a twenty-eight-year-old man should have been able to. He picked up the little dog. “Come on, pup. You can play in the bathroom for a while.”
Wolf—Appearance – 10, Likability -10, Attitude – 10, Usefulness – 0.
When he came back from putting the dog in the upstairs bathroom, he found Rachel standing in the middle of the living room, gazing at the artwork.
“Henry likes your pictures.” She turned the Barbie doll toward Rigger.
“Thank you, Henry.”
Rigger watched the woman remove her coat, drape it over a chair-back, and take a bibbed apron from her handbag. The apron still had a K-Mart price tag attached. She yanked off the tag, stuffed it into her pocket, slipped the neck strap over her head, and tied the apron strings in the back. Her apricot blouse contrasted nicely with the short tan skirt. It wasn’t the same outfit she wore before. Neither were her red peep-toe pumps.
“I’ll start in the kitchen. That’s always the worst.”
She didn’t wait for a response before walking away toward the formal dining room, which opened onto a large sunny kitchen. Her heels tapped across the hardwood floor that shimmered under a new coat of wax.
Rigger sat on the edge of his chair and looked at Rachel. “Well, what are we to do?”
“Henry Bouvier got to have operate.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, she’s dying.”
Rigger blinked. Building a dollhouse of cushions was what he’d expected. “Who’ll do the surgery?”
She looked at him, her brows knitted as well as a four-year-old can do that sort of thing.
“Operate,” he explained. “Who’s going to operate on her?”
“You are,” she said matter-of-factly, as if that should have been obvious. “But first she has to go to the bathroom.”
“Wolf is in the upstairs bathroom, but there’s another one, just down that hall.” He pointed toward a hallway to the right of the fireplace.
Rachel looked intently into Henry’s eyes. A small volume of two-way optical twittering went on for several seconds.
“Nope,” Rachel said, “has to be the upstairs bathroom.”
“Okay, but—”
The girl jumped up and ran toward the stairs, giving the kitchen a quick look.
“Hey,” Rigger said in a loud whisper.
She stopped, turning toward him, her foot on the second step.
“You forgot Henry.” He picked up the doll from where she lay at his feet.
Rachel ran back, grabbed Henry from his hand, and ran again for the stairs. With another glance toward the kitchen, she bounded up the steps.
Rigger smiled. Wolf—Appearance – 10, Likability – 10, Attitude – 10, Usefulness – 10. Perfect score.
Five minutes passed. He listened to the too-loud cleaning noises coming from the kitchen. Another five minutes, and Rigger began to wonder if Rachel was all right.
The woman came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. “Where’s Rachel?”
“Um…in the bathroom.” Rigger looked at the stairway, then at the hall. “It’s down there.” He pointed toward the hall on the right side of the fireplace, where the downstairs bathroom was.
“Well, I probably need to do that next anyway.” She started for the hall.
“Wait!”
She stopped and stared at him.
“How did you do in the kitchen?” He went to inspect her work. She followed.
“Oh, man,” she mumbled loud enough for him to hear. “I hope this isn’t going to be one of those kind of jobs.”
After a cursory inspection of the kitchen, he glanced over the woman’s right shoulder, watching the stairway. “Looks pretty good.”
Her face took on a quizzical expression.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never asked your name.”
“Katrina. Katrina Raider.”
He held out his hand to her. She took it. Her hand was limp and cold in his. He let go.
“I’m Rigger.”
“Glad to meet you. How many bedrooms you got in this place?”
He regarded her, wondering why she asked that.
“It’s a professional question. I’ve got to clean them, you know.”
“Oh. Three.”
“You sleep in all of them?”
Rigger knew this wasn’t a joke. “Yes.” He saw Rachel tiptoeing down the stairs with Henry and smiled. “But not every night.” He waited until the girl took a seat on the hearth. “Come on, I’ll show you where they are.”
“Hi, Mama,” Katrina said as she and Rigger walked into the living room. “What’cha been doing?”
Rigger marveled at how sweet she was to the girl and contrasted that wonderful camaraderie he saw between them with the resentful, almost spiteful way Katrina talked to him. He envied a relationship so close, a mother and her little girl could call each other ‘Mama.’
“Thinking,” Rachel said.
“About what?”
“That house with a yard back grass you told about.”
“You mean grass back yard.”
“And monkey box.”
“Monkey bars.”
“And sand box.”
“Is that your gadget?” Katrina asked Rigger, nodding toward the mantel.
Rigger looked at it, then back at her. “Excuse me?”
“I said, what is that gadget?”
He walked to the fireplace and reached for the object. It was an electromechanical device suspended in a solid block of clear Lucite. It measured exactly three and a half inches square. He rotated it to catch the light, admiring the precision milled parts and tiny gold-etched circuit paths running zig-zags over the octagonal silver cover.
“It’s a triple-stabilized, self-calibrating thermionic gyroscope.”
“Oh.” She took it from his outstretched hand. “Sounds dangerous.”
“Only if you hold it too close to your heart.” He grinned at her.
She held it away from her body and looked at the other side. “What’s it for?”
“It’s part of the guidance system for cruise missiles.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He expected some show of admiration, or at least approval.
“Then you’ve killed a lot of people.” She handed it back to him.
“Maybe I should’ve said it’s used in the guidance system of the Benedict Arnold also.” He put the gyroscope back on the mantel. “Or at least a variation of this one.”
“Traitor?” she said. “The anti-cruise-missile missile?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m destitute, not illiterate. There was an exhaustive article in Newsweek last month about the Benedict Arnold, also known as The Traitor.”
Rigger had read the same article. During the second Gulf War, eight cruise missiles had gone astray, three of them killing civilians. The same problem had occurred in the Afghanistan war. It was during that war the Pentagon decided to proceed with development of the Benedict Arnold, which soon became called the Traitor. Its main purpose was to birddog the Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missiles. If one of them deviated from its course, even by as little as two degrees, the Traitor, which measured less than four feet in length, would instantly accelerate and destroy the errant cruise missile. Still an embarrassing mistake, having a highly developed weapon misbehave, but an airburst wasn’t nearly as deadly as having a confused cruiser fly through the window of a new bride’s wedding party. If the cruise missile performed as prescribed, then the Traitor would follow it into the target and add its own small contribution to the resultant explosion.
The second reason the guys in the Pentagon E-Ring wanted the Traitor developed was for use against enemy cruise missiles. This was, perhaps, the more important mission; a mission they knew would play a leading role in next war.
“Where’s your copy of the gyro for the Traitor?” she asked.
“They wouldn’t let me have one.” He didn’t bother to add that the new model was still too hush-hush even for the developer to have one in his own home. There was also the Dragonfly project, but he felt no desire to invite any more animosity from her; she was hostile enough.
“Now I’m impressed,” the woman said.
Rigger stared at her for a moment, thinking it would have felt better if she’d simply slapped his face. “I’ll show you the bedrooms.”
The words came out with a flinty edge, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. He walked past her toward the hallway. He’d had enough of her surly attitude. After showing her the master bedroom downstairs and two additional bedrooms upstairs, he left her and returned to the living room to find the little girl.
“What’s your name?” Rachel asked.
“Rigger Entime.”
She held Henry in front of her face, with the doll facing Rigger. “I don’t think so,” she said in her deepest voice.
“Then what do you think my name is?”
“God.” She laid Henry on the carpet and began removing the doll’s clothing.
Rigger was taken aback. God? he thought. A god is a creator; not a destroyer. Obviously, she doesn’t realize who God is, or isn’t.
“Well, Rachel…” He was lost for a moment. “I’ve been mistaken for a lot of different people, but never anyone as magnanimous as He.”
She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes. She then crooked her pointer finger, motioning him to come closer.
He bent down.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.
“What’s that?” he whispered, too.
“I don’t like big words.”
He straightened up. “Oh, sorry.”
“If you’re going to use big words, you have to talk to Kat…I mean Mama.” She went back to work on Henry. “She knows about big words.”
“Well, I’d much rather talk to you.” Rachel—Appearance – 10, Likability – 10, Attitude – 9, Usefulness – 7.
“I think it’s right here,” she said. Henry lay naked on the floor between them, smiling up at Rigger. Rachel pressed her fingertip to the doll’s tummy.
“What’s right there?”
