Someone Else's Shoes(18)

To distract herself, she boils the kettle three times again, makes a black tea and drinks that. And finally, when she can take the clawing hunger pains no longer, she rips open the little packet and puts a cookie into her mouth. The pale cookie manages to be both dry and claggy at the same time. But it might be one of the most delicious things she has ever tasted. Oh, God, it’s so good. So full of crap and so damn good. Nisha closes her eyes and savors every mouthful of the two small cookies, letting out little noises of pleasure. Then she eats the second packet. She shakes it onto her palm, to retrieve the last few tiny crumbs, rips it open and licks the inside. Then, when there is definitely nothing left, she throws it into the bin.

Nisha sits, and checks her watch.

And she waits.



* * *



? ? ?

    She has been to an English pub once before, in the Cotswolds, with one of Carl’s associates who owned a sprawling shooting estate and thought it would be fun for them to partake in the English tradition of “sinking a pint.” The building had been straight out of the history books, full of beams and wonky ceilings, suffused with the smell of woodsmoke, with a cute hand-painted antique sign outside and the door surrounded by roses. The landlord had known everyone by name, and had even allowed entry to dogs, which lay at the feet of men in tweed with bad teeth and braying voices, the car park a mix of mud-spattered old four-wheel drives and the immaculate Porsches and Mercedes of weekenders.

A bar girl served up little plates of cubed cheese (you wanted to see the lab bacterial results on shared plates—ugh) and small brown pies with unidentifiable meat that she had pretended to nibble at. The bottled water was lukewarm. She smiled at the raucous jokes, and wished she had stayed back at the house. But she had made it a habit to be at Carl’s side at all times.

This is not that kind of pub. This is like the bars in roadside joints several miles off the highway where she had grown up, where girls wore tank tops and short shorts and men wished they were at a Hooters and behaved as if they were. She walks into the White Horse and is instantly enveloped in a sea of bodies and noise, groups of people yelling beery fumes at each other over thumping music that is just a few decibels too loud. She pushes her way through the crowd, trying to shrink to avoid the men who are lurching around aimlessly, apparently already drunk at seven thirty in the evening.

She had hoped to sit quietly in a corner somewhere, but all the seats are taken, people elbowing their way in as soon as a table vacated, like some kind of muscular game of musical chairs. She waits instead in a porch area by a door, as if she were thinking of going for a smoke, and shaking her head at the guys who asked her if she “has a spare fag.” All the while she scans the crowd, waiting for a man who will give her a nod of recognition.

He has come via a friend of a friend of Magda’s husband, who knew people, and has contacts in every country. She had made the arrangements directly on a burner phone six weeks ago so that Magda was involved as little as possible. (She had pleaded to be kept out of it, It is better if I know nothing, Mrs. Cantor, I do not want to get into any trouble.) And when the guy had reported back last week, he said the surveillance job had been embarrassingly easy and that she “would not be disappointed.” She had sent him cash, and a Patek Philippe watch that Carl had decided he needed two years ago at the airport in Dubai and had been too drunk to remember buying afterward.

There was no point in her trying to identify this guy by his looks. They were all the same, these goons, anyhow, with their military haircuts and their thick necks. She’d know him because he’d be the only guy here who wasn’t drunk and spraying saliva halfway around the room.

“Got a fag, darling?” A young man appears in front of her. He wears a white polo shirt, and track pants, whose crotch sags down to his knees, and he has a glassy flush to his cheeks that says he has been drinking for some time.

“No,” she says.

“Waiting for someone, are you?”

She looks him up and down. “Yes. Waiting for you to get lost.”

“Whooooh!” She sees then that a group of other young men are with him, equally well lubricated, nudging each other and howling.

“You’re sassy. I love a sassy lass,” he says, and raises his eyebrows suggestively, like she might find that a compliment. “American, are you?”

She ignores him and shifts slightly, so that she is facing away from them all.

“Aww, don’t be arsy. C’mon. Let me buy you a drink, darling. What do you drink? Vodka tonic?”

“Let him buy you a drink, Yankee Doodle.”

She keeps her face turned away. She can smell his aftershave, something cheap and pungent. “I don’t want one. Please go right ahead and enjoy your night.”

“I won’t enjoy it without you . . . Come on, darling. Let me buy you a drink. You’re all on your . . .”

He puts a hand on her arm, and she whips around and hisses, “Fuck off, and leave me alone.”

This time the whooooh! from his friends has a slightly harder tone. They are getting annoying. She needs to focus, to make sure she doesn’t miss her guy.

The young man’s face has flushed and hardened to a blank stare. “No need to be rude,” he says.

“Yeah. There is, apparently,” she responds. And then as they shuffle off back into the pub with a couple of sulky backward glances, she walks over to a portly middle-aged guy in a rumpled jacket talking to a friend, leaning against one of the windows.