The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [2]
“Seems like it’s always going to be something. I been with you eight years and I never know if he’s coming or going.”
“So, maybe it was a mistake for me to start performing again,” Claire said tentatively. “Maybe I should have waited until Kate was older.”
“Maybe this and maybe that. Work’s important. For a man, and a woman.” Yolanda caught Claire by the wrist and shook her arm gently. “You’re lucky. You got a good man, and good kids, and a good job. The only mistake you made was not finding someone who could stay late.”
“You’re half right,” Claire said, smiling and leaning forward to embrace Yolanda. “I’m lucky—with Mark, and with the children, and with this opportunity. But Kate and Kyle would never forgive me if you left us. I’ll figure something out.”
More than an hour had passed, and the man in the camel-hair coat fidgeted restlessly behind the wheel of the BMW. The weather worked in their favor, limiting the number of pedestrians who might get a good look at him, but it was well past time for them to be gone. He yearned for a cigarette. Whoever owned the car was a smoker, and the smell was driving him to distraction. He’d had to quit after Desert Storm, when weeks spent in the burning oil fields had permanently damaged his lungs. But nothing eased a long wait like a smoke.
A hundred yards north, his companions were equally impatient. Only two people had come out of the apartment building on the opposite corner: an older Hispanic woman with a scarf tied over her hair and a black man with a German shepherd on a leash. The man with the burn looked at his watch again. She hadn’t ever been this late before. He’d checked her performance schedule—curtain-up was in less than half an hour. He wondered if she might have left early because of the weather.
“Ten more minutes,” he said.
The second man stamped his feet against the cold and swore. Bad beginnings made bad endings, and the woman was only the first of two jobs they had that evening.
“No,” Kate and Kyle screamed together, heaving couch pillows at the TV while Claire laughed. They’d finished dinner and snuggled up on the couch to watch Titanic, but the opening credits had barely finished rolling when the picture changed to a Latin man in a white tuxedo, lip-syncing a song in Spanish as he danced on top of a taxicab in Times Square. Much as they’d begged Yolanda not to change the channel on the cable box when the VCR was recording, she frequently forgot.
“I’ll run to the store and rent it,” Claire said, setting aside the blanket on her lap.
Kyle glanced outside. The wind was blowing harder, raising long plumes of spindrift from the snow-laden window ledges.
“Let me,” he said, getting to his feet.
Claire looked over her shoulder to check the time on the kitchen clock. Kyle had started moving around the neighborhood by himself only in the last year.
“I could use the fresh air,” she said.
“Liar,” he teased. “You hate the cold. And you said it yourself—I’m not a baby anymore.”
Claire bit her lip and nodded.
“Take your phone.”
“I’ll be right back.”
An iron-and-glass door swung open on Riverside Drive, and Kyle emerged from his apartment building. He was wearing a green knit school hat that rode high on his head and a Gore-Tex parka that belonged to his father. The sleeves were bunched behind the elastic cuffs and the shoulders drooped, but he liked wearing it. Digging his hands into the pockets, he touched a folded piece of paper and removed it. A list was jotted in his father’s hand: Rashid, Azikiwo, Statoil, Petronuevo. Some of the words he recognized, and some he didn’t. Rashid was an old friend of his dad’s who worked for OPEC, and Statoil was the Norwegian state oil company. Azikiwo and Petronuevo were unfamiliar to him. He mouthed the words, liking the sounds. Everything about his dad’s job was cool. He wanted to be just like his father when he grew up.
He put the paper back into the pocket, stepped out from beneath the building’s awning, and headed south. Two men were standing on the corner of Eighty-seventh