Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [63]
Kathy got up from the couch, slipped her sandals back on, and stretched. “Well,” she said, “we should get going.”
Minutes later, strolling down Elizabeth Street, he thought that some semblance of peace was beginning to return to the city, though it was a jittery kind of normalcy. They walked through the burgeoning neighborhood that had recently been dubbed NoLita (North of Little Italy), where art students, Asian fashionistas, and would-be screenwriters mixed with the Italian and Latino working-class families who had lived there for generations. The night was balmy, and the trees along Ludlow Street swayed and rippled in the gentle breezes of late summer.
“No-lit-a?” Kathy said, when Lee told her where they were. “What is it with New York? Does every neighborhood have to have a trendy name?”
“I remember TriBeCa before it was called TriBeCa,” Lee said. “It was just a jumble of industrial buildings, not anyplace you’d want to live.”
“Wow,” Kathy said. “And now no one can afford to live there—it’s worse than Chelsea.”
“So are you saying that in Phillie you don’t name your neighborhoods?”
“Well, some of them, sure. But I don’t think we have quite the same rabid zest for it you do.”
“I see.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said quickly. “This is a great town. It’s just that everything is so—so intense, you know? People here are so self-conscious, so aware of the impression they’re making.”
“I know,” he said, smiling as they passed an artsy couple all in black, very thin, perfectly Euro-chic. The woman’s black heels clicked sharply on the pavement, and the man’s pants were so tight that Lee wondered if he had to hold his breath when he sat down.
“Is your arm bothering you?” Kathy asked, glancing at the way he carried his bandaged forearm.
“No, it’s fine,” he lied. Even with the ibuprofen, it still throbbed insistently, but he wanted to get off the subject as quickly as possible.
The meeting was held at Le Poéme, a French/Corsican restaurant owned by a family who lived in the back of the building but seemed to do a lot of their living in the actual restaurant—there were always a couple of kids underfoot, as well as assorted dogs and cats.
When they arrived at La Poéme they were escorted to the rear of the restaurant by the owner, a tall, long-faced Gaul with rumpled gray hair, slumped shoulders, and a weary, benign expression. The back room was kind of a cross between a living room and a restaurant—the décor was an eclectic mix of objets trouvés, secondhand furniture, discarded children’s toys, and dusty spider plants. Furniture and knickknacks from various cultures and time periods lined the wall—blue and white Quimper pottery hung on the wall above a Regency-style couch complete with silk tassels, next to which sat a sturdy French country oak coffee table. Lee would have called it East Village chic, but since this was NoLita he supposed it would have to be called NoLita chic.
The philosophers straggled in one by one, looking very much like what you might expect. A tall, seedy Frenchman with baggy eyes wearing a tattered gray pullover arrived with his petite, sharp-eyed wife, chicly dressed in black spike-heeled boots and a miniskirt over black leggings.
A bearded Russian with tobacco-stained teeth strode in carrying a large leather-bound volume—Dostoevsky? Pushkin? Tolstoy? Lee couldn’t make out the embossed lettering on the front, but it looked old and well worn. Perhaps the Russian had brought it to back up his points with quotes. A nervous-looking young man with an unforgiving crew cut and little round glasses looked as if he was either emulating the dissident German writer Bertolt Brecht