Buffy automatically tucked her purse into the glove compartment before exiting the car. William carried his briefcase with him.
She knew she was rusty when it was only as they approached the glass double doors that Buffy registered their first obstacle.
“You don’t have the key, do you?” Buffy asked, already running through plans of action in her mind. They could retrieve her modified Halligan bar from her house but it would definitely do too much damage to the door.
“Don’t need one.”
William wasn’t sure if what he was about to do would disgust or impress her, but he figured they had few options and when he’d driven by the day before, a cursory glance told him the lock wouldn’t post any problem to his skills.
To Buffy’s amazement, William opened his briefcase and drew out a small flat wrench from an interior pocket. Tucking it under one arm, he then plucked a paper clip off a sheaf of papers before closing and setting his briefcase down.
He deftly undid the wire of the clip until it was almost straight before bending one end into an L-shaped hook. Retrieving the wrench from under his arm, William slid it into the bottom of the lock opening as far as it would go. Buffy watched as he slowly rotated the wrench with one hand while with the other he delicately manipulated the paper clip, inserting it into the top of the lock and raking it a few times before undoing the internal pins one by one. The coordinated movement of his hands was mesmerizing, like a maestro conducting an intricate passage of music. The telltale click punctuated the completion of his performance.
“Presto.”
Buffy just looked at him pointedly.
“Would you believe I was a boy scout?”
Incredulous, she frowned.
“Got a bit of a chequered past,” William admitted by way of explanation, but appearing not in the least chagrined as he pushed the door open with his elbow.
She raised her brows and walked past him into the office. “I’m not even gonna ask.” To herself, she muttered, “See no evil…”
Buffy took quick stock of the space. There front of the store was organized as a waiting area with two neat rows of cushioned chairs lining either end, but most of the space was taken up by an interior teller office walled off with glass windows. Her rubber-soled wedges squeaked as she walked on the beige tiled floor. It smelled mildly of a lemony disinfectant.
“I’ve never actually been in one of these places,” William commented, sauntering in after her. “Practically one on every corner. Sprout up like weeds.”
Buffy’s eyes were trained on a corner of the ceiling, where a black plastic bracket was mounted.
“The police must have taken the surveillance cameras,” she told him.
William walked up to the counter. He gave the spotless window a knock, sounding a dull thud.
“Bulletproof glass. Pretty common,” Buffy said.
Through the glass he could see a nest of heavy cables snaked together on the other side of the counter. “They took the computers too.”
As if by silent assent, they both made their way into the enclosed interior office through an unlocked side door. A set of printers, phones, and a few dozen stacks of receipt pads lined the countertops and built-in lower shelving. There were obvious gaps where the cash registers and computers had rested.
From the inside of the teller office, Buffy looked back out onto the reception area. She realized her view was slightly distorted by the glass, as the further objects were the more they took on a convex, bulbous effect at their edges. She felt like an exhibit in a public aquarium and internally shuddered as she imagined having to work in such a place.
She and William circled separately around the inner office, taking mental note of the unremarkable space. Then, as if on cue, they both focused at the exact same moment on a large gray billboard hung on the back wall. It listed in blinding white letters the going rates for the array of loans and services Holtz’s business provided.
Confronted head-on with the cold, hard numbers, a familiar sense of resentment bubbled up in William that could not be contained.
“These places should be outlawed. ‘Alternative banking.’ It’s loan sharking by another name. Usury,” he seethed quietly.
“They’re not ideal, but they provide a service. Sometimes people need an emergency loan and they can’t get it at the regular bank,” Buffy said, thinking of the time she had needed help with the gas bill after draining her mother’s checking account on funeral expenses.
For some reason, her reasonable assessment bothered William more than it should have. Or perhaps, more than it would have coming from anyone else.
“I think that’s a naïve view,” he said forcefully.
“You think whatever you want,” she countered edgily.
William seemed to be stewing over her comments as he turned away from her to set his briefcase on the nearest counter.
Chewing on her thumb, Buffy watched him open his briefcase. Addressing his rigid shoulders, she finally asked, “Do you have any info on Holtz?”
“I do.” His mouth set in a grim line, he reviewed the few notes he had, recounting, “He’s an expatriate. From York in England originally. He was in seminary for a while before he left for unknown reasons. Came to America and opened up this shop ten years ago. Opened a second shop three years ago, but it’s not a full-service office like this one. As for his personal history, apparently he was a bit of a recluse, no useful leads from neighbors or friends. No family.”
“That’s a big change. From the high church to the church of Mammon.”
William let out an appreciative grunt. “The highest church of all. He must have gotten disillusioned.”
Crossing her arms, she leaned back against the counter. “I wonder why.”
“Does it matter?” William asked distractedly. “No arrests, but then I don’t know how long he was using this business as a front. ’Spose Hamilton could have been his first foray into the wonderful world of criminal patronage. But I doubt it.”
“Like they say, you speed four hundred times before you’re stopped.”
“Or crash in a wreck.”
His words made Buffy reflect upon Holtz’s end. “There’s no motive for his murder yet.”
“Holtz probably wanted more money.”
Buffy was thoughtful, trying to put the possible scenarios together, but there were too many missing pieces.
“Have they found a financial connection between Hamilton and Winters?” she asked.
“No. Winters claims he’s never heard of him and Gavin is buying it.”
“But Carlos said—.”
“I know. Carlos also said he saw papers in Holtz’s office with Hamilton’s name all over them. So where are they?”
“Here?”
He rested a hand on the counter. “We’ll find out. They ruled out recovering anything useful in his paper records. Seems the police department’s as apathetic as the D.A.’s office on this one.” He glanced back at her.
Suddenly, the words came tumbling out. “They matched the bullet we found to a gun.”
Taken aback, William asked, “They found Hamilton’s gun?”
“No. I should have said that differently.” Buffy wrinkled her nose. “They matched the bullet to pulled bullets in the database, connected to the same firearm. The bullet came from Freeman Trick’s weapon.”
“Why is that name familiar?”
“He was Dashawn’s uncle?”
William remembered then the bits of family history he had gleaned about the Richards family from his meeting with Buffy’s ex-captain. Though it bothered him that Buffy hadn’t mentioned it earlier, he said without accusation, “You didn’t say anything before.”
She looked away. “I’m saying it now.”
“Why would Hamilton have his gun? He’s dead, right?”
She nodded gravely. “And I have no idea. I wish I did.” William could see how much she meant it.
“Did they work together?”
“I don’t know.”
“They must have.”
Buffy raised and dropped her hands helplessly.
Like a thunderbolt, conviction seized William. “Dashawn must know.”
Buffy started to shake her head, and William pounced.
“It’s too much of a coincidence he happens to work for the same man who has his uncle’s gun,” he insisted.
“I thought that right away. But he doesn’t know. He didn’t understand what I was even asking about. He was still pretty young when everything happened with his uncle.”
The report she had given him earlier in her office came back to William. “So you talked to him? Recently?”
Buffy had had an inkling of it before, but now she knew for certain not much was liable to get past him. She decided to come clean.
“I did. Yesterday. After I found out about the gun.”
Shaking his head, he mock-scolded her, “You’re awfully cagey, you know.”
“I’m just careful,” Buffy defended herself.
With some impatience, William said to her, “You can trust me. What have you got to lose?”
Buffy raised an eyebrow. “This is serious stuff. Excuse me for trying to be discreet. And I’m not the one with anything to lose. You might wanna dial back the ‘I’ve gone rogue—ask me how’ attitude, by the way.”
“What, you worried about me?”
She shot him a good-natured glare. “Never.”
William was silent for a few moments, debating what to say, wondering what would break down her walls.
“You’re gonna have to tell me the whole tale some day, you know,” he said meaningfully.
“Not today,” she forced out cheekily.
“Fair enough.”
As silence fell between them, Buffy noticed she could hear her own breathing in the hermetic atmosphere. “It’s claustrophobic in here.”
William jerked his head towards the door. “Let’s move along, shall we? See the inner sanctum.”
They made their way to the back hallway, taking a brief detour into a closet-sized room that turned out to house nothing more than an open safe, before locating Holtz’s private office.
Entering the room was a jarring experience. While the public offices had felt impersonal and oppressively immaculate, his private space was shabbily furnished and lived-in. The worn umber carpeting had buckled in various places. A small desk with a wood laminate top and old-style swivel chair occupied the middle of the cramped room. Along the greater part of one wall, there were rows upon rows of books stacked on shelves six-high. On the opposite wall, a series of vertical black filing cabinets filled the space.
Buffy walked over to the shelves. As she skimmed her fingers along the spine of the books, curious titles caught her eye. “Bronze Age Antiquities… Enlightenment and Conquest… Geography of the World,” she read out.
William glanced over at her, intrigued. “Guess he fancied himself an amateur historian.“
He was inspecting the desk. It was sparsely populated by a red glass dish of hard toffee candies, a bottle green banker’s lamp, and a New York Times book of Sunday crosswords.
“How quaint. All he need’s a few doilies and he can open up a tea and reading room in here. Have to say, I expect more from my criminal masterminds.”
Buffy graced him with a sardonic smile. “Somehow, I doubt this guy qualifies.”
William opened the single desk drawer to find business cards, black pens, and a yellowed handkerchief. A silver flask for hard liquor tucked in the back brought a grudging smile to his face.
“Is that what we’re here for?” Buffy asked, getting his attention. She indicated the cabinets with a nod of her head.
“Indeed.”
William slammed the drawer shut and began walking over to the opposite wall but Buffy stood unmoving behind him.
“Research mode. Yay.” Her tone was unenthusiastic.
William was examining an open binder lying on top of one of the cabinets.
“What’s that?”
He was paging through the black binder with interest. “Index of names.”
“Clients? Cool. See if Hamilton’s in there,” Buffy said as she wandered over to a random cabinet and pulled opened a drawer. It was crammed full of manila folders front to back.
“Hold on.” His consternation was audible. Eyes glued to the page, William spoke again. “There’s something wrong with this list. Bishop de Landa. Bumbles Green.”
”Bumbles?”
William raked his fingers through his hair. “These aren’t real names. Or rather, they are. They’re pseudonyms. He’s using some kind of code.” He turned his head to look back at the bookshelves. “Product of his bibliomania.”
Buffy groaned. “Great. A con man with layers.”
“There must be some way to figure out—,” he cut off with a pause, flipping pages. “Mary Barton. Muhammad al-Khowarizmi?” William asked, tripping over the name. “Nero? What the hell?” His voice kept rising in volume.
“Let’s see.”
Buffy pulled opened the heavy drawer labeled ‘M-N,’ and searched for the file. Finding it, she opened it and her eyes landed on a name. “Quentin Travers,” she read aloud.
“Why is he labeled Nero?”
As Buffy rifled through the stack of papers, she said slowly, “I don’t know, but I think this guy looks fishy. There are a whole stack of title loans here.”
William came over to her to see them for himself. She spread the paperwork across the top of the packed row of folders.
He was standing near enough to her as he studied the receipts and documents that Buffy could smell his cologne mixed with faint traces of cigarette smoke. She had caught the same scents when she had ridden in his car but they were much pleasanter emanating from a warm body.
“Odd,” he muttered as he compared the loan scrips. “It’s the same VIN number on all of them. What’s that pile you have there?”
Buffy read the boldface type on the official, identically formatted sheets in front of her.
“Repossession notices?”
The crease in William’s brow cleared. A basic blueprint he had encountered in a myriad of different forms over the years of his career emerged for him once again.
He took a step back and made a sweeping circular gesture at the papers before them. “Well. You thought right. This is all a scam.”
“How does it work?”
Animatedly, William explained, “Mr. Travers gets a title loan from Holtz for a car, then sells the car with title to some poor sod. When the sod in question claims the title, he finds out there’s a loan on it and he has to either pay it or, more likely, return the car to the title company—that would be Holtz—to avoid repossession. Either way, they would profit. And I’m guessing no money changed hands between Holtz and Travers before the sale. The loans were fraudulent to begin with.”
Buffy glanced down at the notices. “And then the car—?”
“Goes back to Travers.” He pointed to the stack of title loan papers. “Rinse and repeat.”
Buffy nodded slowly. She was fairly awed by the speed and seeming effortlessness with which William had deciphered their scheme.
“Score one for serendipity?” she asked, handing him the folder.
“Free felony gift with homicide purchase, more like,” he said, accepting it grudgingly.
His words reminded Buffy what they were there for.
“So, none of that explains why he’s filed away as Nero. What’s the connection?”
“Search me. Some kind of nickname?”
Buffy considered this. “For Quentin Travers?”
Hearing the name again, William felt some tidbit of knowledge pushing its way to the surface. His brow creased in thought. “Well. Quentin is Latinate. For quintus, if I remember. Fifth.”
Buffy was staring at him with a blank look.
“I guess… yeah. Nero was the fifth Roman emperor, wasn’t he?” William asked.
Buffy chewed on her bottom lip.
“I was never really bookworm girl.”
“Augustus… Tiberius…” William murmured, trying to remember the order drilled into him in school. “Yeah, I think that’s right.”
Rubbing her neck, Buffy looked down at the bulging stack of vertical files before her. “So there’s a logic to all this?”
William sighed. “Only in his own brain, I’m guessing. ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ as the man said.”
A name caught Buffy’s eye. “Oh look,” she said, pulling out a thin folder, “The Marquis de Sade was one of his clients too.”
William watched as she pored over the few papers in the file.
“AKA Justine Cooper. Well that’s weird. They’re not even the same gender.”
“Justine Cooper?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, alright. Justine,” William said, pronouncing it the French way. “By the Marquis de Sade. Name of a book he wrote.” He nodded, satisfied. “Simple.”
“He wrote a book?” Buffy asked in surprise.
“Oh, several.” He grinned at her wolfishly. “Great bedtime reading.”
Buffy shook her head and purposely didn’t make eye contact. “Don’t even,” she warned, suppressing a smile.
“And just what kind of nasty business was the lovely Justine involved in?”
“She bought a prepaid debit card,” Buffy deadpanned. Holding up the receipt for William to see, she said, “That’s pretty much all that’s here. Looks legit.”
“How disappointing.” William surveyed the rows of cabinets before them. “So he kept everything from meaningless transactions to second-degree felonies in these files? For what, his own amusement?”
“Maybe he thought he was gonna be audited by the IRS.” Buffy shook her head. “This guy was nuts. No wonder they gave up.”
“Well, we’re here. Might as well play it out for a bit.” He folded his arms and took a step back. “Reverse engineering, right? Who are our usual suspects?”
Catching on, Buffy chirped, “Russell Winters.”
“Right. What comes to mind?” William thought about the two files they had looked into. “Think about the first name in particular.”
“Russell.” Buffy repeated the name in her mind. “Jack Russell?” she word associated.
Looking puzzled for a moment, William then shrugged. “Why not.”
As he checked for the listings under ‘J,’ Buffy went about locating the right section of files. She moved to the bottommost drawer of the next cabinet. Getting down on her knees, she pulled the drawer open all the way out and bent over it to peer into the archival abyss.
Feeling only a little guilty about it, William blatantly stared at the perfect view she had inadvertently presented him with of her backside. His fingers twitched as his eyes took in their fill. Her khaki capris fit her like a second skin. In fact they fit her so well he soon realized she couldn’t be wearing much of anything underneath them.
“Nada,” Buffy concluded, brushing her hands together as she stood up abruptly.
He whipped his head up so fast he nearly gave his neck a cramp.
“Are you ok?” Buffy noticed he looked flushed.
“Yeah. Bit stuffy in here.”
“Yeah,” Buffy agreed. She fingered the button of the pink cardigan layer she had put on over her twinset as if she was contemplating taking it off.
William didn’t think he could handle watching even an innocuous striptease at that particular moment.
He cleared his throat to get her attention. “Anything else?” William asked. “That you can think of.”
Buffy bit her lip in thought. “Russell Crowe?” she finally offered half-heartedly.
He leafed through the pages just to focus his mind on something else. Buffy didn’t even bother to move.
“You’re the one who’s good at this,” she challenged him.
William thought for a moment. “Bertrand Russell?”
“Who’s that?”
“Philosopher.”
“Oh.” Buffy still didn’t recognize the name. “Sure.”
William checked the index. “Nothing. It’s likely he wouldn’t have anything directly connected to Winters here in the first place.”
They both deflated at that thought.
“Hey, didn’t you say his real name was Bernard?”
Approvingly, William replied, “Yes. I did. It is.” He racked his brains but couldn’t think of anything.
Buffy leaned back against a cabinet and stared into space. “So maybe Bernard.” She said the first thing that popped into her mind. “St. Bernard?”
Perplexed and amused, William turned toward her. “Are dogs and celebrities all you know?”
Instead of the smart retort he expected, Buffy just shrank before him, speechless. “Whatever,” she bit out, turning her attention back toward the open drawer on the other side of her.
Her reaction took him by complete surprise. Concerned, William unconsciously reached a hand out toward her as he said, “Hey, it was just a joke, pet.”
“You’re hilarious,” she said flatly, not looking at him as she thumbed aimlessly through the M-N files.
“Buffy, I—”
“This isn’t working,” she interrupted him. She blew out a breath. “Who’s left already so we can get of here?”
William leaned back on his heels. “Marcus Hamilton.” He scratched at his neck. “Marcus Aurelius comes to mind but that doesn’t seem to be how this works.”
Buffy remained silent.
As a last-ditch effort, William asked, “And who was your bloke again?”
“Oh, Trick? Freeman Trick.”
“Strange name.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “What do you think?”
Defiantly, she threw at him, “Morgan Freeman?”
He broke into a full-fledged smile. Then something suddenly clicked in his mind between Freeman Trick and Morgan Freeman.
“What?” Buffy asked, noticing his odd expression.
“Freeman is a name that’s not a name.”
“And that makes the kind of sense that doesn’t.”
William looked at her seriously. “It means free man.”
Turning the pages he was holding, he started rapidly scanning down the list of names.
“What are you looking for?”
“Just—a trigger.”
His finger stopped next to a name. Tapping on the paper, he said decisively, “Yes. Somerset. James Somerset.”
“Who’s James Somerset?”
With a bemused expression, he said, “First official free man in England.”
“Huh?”
He darted to the cabinets. Jerking open a drawer, he zeroed in on the object of his search while he hurriedly explained, “Was a ruling called the Mansfield Judgment. Eighteenth century. Made slavery illegal in England. And,” he said, pulling out a worn-looking folder, “James Somerset became a free man.”
With a hint of frustration, Buffy asked herself, “Why don’t I know this?”
William was confused by her question. “Most people don’t.”
“Right.” Buffy reached for the folder. “Can I see?”
“’Course.” William handed it over to her.
Needing space, Buffy moved away from the cabinets and carefully placed the folder down on Holtz’s desk. Her hand trembled a little as she opened it. Her mouth was dry and she felt like an archaeologist unearthing a newly discovered tomb.
On top of a small pile of documents was a photocopy of a fake California driver's license for one James Somerset. Picking up the piece of paper, Buffy zeroed in on the image of the bright-eyed, sculpted face sporting a pencil-thin mustache. She would recognize Trick's face anywhere. The picture was black-and-white, but she saw his trademark yellow gold hoop earrings as if it was a color photograph.
Standing beside her, William reached out to study the other papers in the file. As he flipped through the few sheets, his excitement grew.
Registering a few seconds late the fact that William had started talking, Buffy finally tore her eyes away from the image in her hand.
"What?" she asked.
"I said we just found out he's been at this a while. He laundered money for Trick."
He squinted to see what she was holding.
"What's that? Fake ID? So it wasn't just his own code name, but a pseudonym."
"I guess so." Buffy gingerly put the photocopy down.
"Look here," he said, holding out the few pages to her. "They ran a typical scheme. Money moved into the business through these phony invoices. Then Holtz opened a bank account in Panama. Probably had it wired back to his own accounts here after that." He did a quick mental calculation. "Not a whole lot of dosh, altogether. Hardly seems worth the risk. Unless it was a path to bigger things."
Buffy examined the three invoices.
"This late date is two weeks before his death," she told him.
"That explains that, then."
William began pacing in a circle. Eager to make use of the new information, he speculated, “So if Holtz did this for Trick, and Trick and Hamilton worked together, it fits that Hamilton sought out Holtz when he had a big new assignment to fulfill, don’t it?”
“For Russell Winters,” Buffy supplied.
“Only problem is, none of them are around to tell us anything and Winters is one step ahead.” William stopped moving. "Would be helpful to know how they all found each other."
Buffy thought over the newest wrinkle Trick had posthumously provided.
“I think there’s one person who can tell us more about all of this,” she told William.
“Yeah?”
“Rona Richards.”
“The sister?”
“Yeah, she used to be my C.I. I’ve been trying to reach her for days.”
“Has she skipped town?”
“I don’t think so."
Buffy was looking at him with a question in her eyes, but William wasn’t sure what it was.
"Sooner or later, she’ll call me back.”
“All right,” he replied measuredly.
“She’s—difficult.”
“Sure she’s nothing we can’t handle, right?” It seemed to be the right response, as Buffy perked up immediately.
As she began to rearrange the papers in the file, William suggested, “We might as well call it a day. Not sure what else we’re going to come up with tonight.”
Buffy was wistful as she gazed at the cabinets. “There must be more here. But there’s thousands of files.”
“We have the key.” He grabbed the binder. “I’ll have Andrew work this list over. He might be able to figure something out.”
“I hope you’re paying him overtime,” Buffy commented as they made their way back to the front of the shop.
From behind her, William muttered, “Between this and the spying he’ll be jumping ship soon.”
Buffy almost missed what he said. “Spying?”
He held the door open for her. “Hear no evil?”
It was still early evening as they drove back towards downtown in William’s car, side by side in comfortable silence. Both were enjoying a sense of accomplishment for more success than either had anticipated. William watched as Buffy let out an adorable yawn and though he felt a bit fatigued himself he was still loathe to drop her back off at her office just yet. Checking the time, he considered the options.
As they approached Figueroa boulevard, he said casually, “Well, I’m starving. You wanna grab a burger here? I’ve never been but I know they’re famous for them. Xander’s always going on about them. ‘Special sauce’ and so on.”
“Um, no. But you go ahead, I’ll wait,” Buffy offered.
Her accommodating refusal confounded him. Furrowing his brow, he shot her a skeptical glance. “You’re not one of those anorexic types are you, ‘cause—”
“No,” she said vehemently. “I just—don’t eat meat, actually.”
Floored, William was momentarily at a loss.
“Oh, well where do you—” he then began again.
Annoyed, Buffy said dismissively, “Just don’t worry about it, ok?”
“You do still eat, don’t you?” he stated, refusing to let the matter drop.
“Yes,” she said crisply, looking at him like he was an idiot.
“So?” he prompted, sounding the word out with infinite slowness.
She sighed. “There’s a place I go to on Grand but I really don’t think—“
“Right. Hang on.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were standing in line at the counter of Nature’s Way. William studied the unfamiliar menu in his hands. “Tofu Surprise. Now if that doesn’t inspire fear, I don’t know what will.”
“There are other things you can order,” Buffy replied, as if speaking to a child, refusing to turn around as she did so.
“Oh no, I think I have to try that,” he decided, flinging his menu back on the pile.
“Suit yourself,” she said, moving to the front of the line. “Hi, Mrs. Kim,” she greeted the serious-faced Korean woman behind the counter.
“Ah hello,” Mrs. Kim replied with something resembling a smile. “Veggie supreme, same as yesterday?”
William chuckled from behind her. “I take it you don’t brown bag it.”
Buffy turned a little red.
Ten minutes later, a harried Mr. Kim dashed out to their tiny table in the front corner of the small restaurant to deliver their food bowls and canned sodas before disappearing back into the kitchen. Buffy slid the milkglass bud vase with a single silk orchid that stood between them across the plastic yellow tablecloth to an out of the way spot next to the salt and pepper dispensers. William cracked open his Dr. Pepper and contemplated the chopsticks tucked into his rolled napkin before looking over to see Buffy discard her own set in favor of her fork and following suit.
They ate silently for several minutes.
“So how is it?” Buffy finally asked William in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care what his answer was.
Swallowing the food in his mouth, he looked at her impassively for a moment before breaking into a grin. “I’ll live."
Buffy just smiled wryly.
"No, it’s quite good actually.” He finished chewing another bite before leaning back in his chair and asking her, “So, uh, how long have you been waging this war on plants?”
Buffy pursed her lips. “Are you looking for more ammunition?”
“I’m just curious,” William backtracked carefully. “How did you become a vegetarian?”
“Just the usual way. In college, my friend Ben was a zoology major. He showed me the videos from his biology class of what happens on factory farms. Seeing that carnage kind of quelled my appetite for destruction,” Buffy said glibly, taking another bite of her stir-fry.
William studied her closed expression. “You could eat, what, organic meat instead,” he pointed out.
“A lot of my friends do. Angel does too,” Buffy agreed, nodding absently.
“So why don’t you?” William asked.
“I don’t know, I just got in the habit of not eating meat, I guess.”
William felt dissatisfied with her equivocation. “There must be a real reason,” he pressed, regarding her closely. “Something… deeper that that.”
She seemed to be sizing him up, or challenging him, he wasn’t sure which. Playing idly with the fork in her bowl, Buffy slumped back in her chair. A lock of her hair fell across her forehead.
He thought she wasn’t going to answer until she did.
“Well I guess when I was little I always wanted a dog,” she began haltingly, staring at the edge of her plastic bowl thoughtfully. “I used to have this book with every breed in it and I’d pick a new one every day to ask for. Like a catalog, almost.” Feeling slightly embarrassed by this disclosure, she plowed ahead without looking up. “So I was big with the Benji love. But it was really just this… abstract thing? And I never got one,” she shrugged and the hand holding her fork stilled. “Then when I was in college I started volunteering at this animal shelter. It was right after I saw the videos. And the dogs weren’t at all what I thought they’d be. They were cute but they were also odd and funny and mysterious. They weren’t toys and they weren’t machines. They were—alive.”
Struggling as she always did to express the profundity of her feeling through the banality of words, Buffy paused before repeating, “So alive.” She lifted up her face as she said, “And they were dying all the time.” As her eyes met William’s again she was surprised to see him so intently focused on her and what she was saying. Encouraged, she concluded, “And then it just seemed like—dogs and pigs and cows? They’re not so different. Not so different from us either, maybe. But we kill them. They live to be killed,” she finished with feeling.
A grave silence hung between them for a few moments.
A dismissive statement about how the pitiless ways of the world left no room for sentimentality was on the tip of William’s tongue when he shocked them both by blurting out instead, “I didn’t know what meat was.”
“What?” a startled Buffy asked.
Mortified, something inside of him nonetheless compelled William to go on.
“Until I was nine, I mean. I didn’t really understand it was actually muscle.” He made a vague gesture towards his head as he said, “Before then, I guess in my mind I must’ve thought that was why we ate animals, because they had what we didn’t, what we needed. They were meat, they had these… meat parts,” he finished lamely, expecting Buffy to laugh at him.
Instead she just seemed to be raptly absorbing his odd confession.
“Oh. Well that makes sense,” she said, nodding. “I don’t even know when I learned what meat really was. So how did you figure it out?” she asked, taking a sip of her diet Coke.
William’s brow furrowed deeply as the memories long laid to rest were stirred anew.
“I used to have this friend, Clem.” He smiled affectionately at the image of the pasty, ginger-haired child that immediately sprang up. “Pint-sized little runt he was with this skin condition.”
“What kind of—?” Buffy started to ask.
“Hmm? Oh, dunno really. I guess… eczema or something or other,” he mused, as if he had never considered the question before. “It kind of—fell off in pieces. He hated it, but I always told him it was like having a secret weapon.” The boisterous sound of schoolyard shrieks and screams echoed in his mind. “When we played bulldog, no one wanted to touch him.”
William paused, frowning, before saying, “He was my best mate.”
Seeing Buffy watching him expectantly brought him back to what it was he’d wanted to tell her.
“So, ah, this one time I was invited to Clem’s house for dinner and I went with him and his mother to her butcher’s beforehand to pick up her Sunday roast,” he began, running his hand through his hair. “His stock was all laid out under glass, just like at the sweet shop. Everything was marbled and perfect, nothing ragged or hacked. Butcher was trying to sell her his leftover chuck. Chuck, and silverside, and he had a special on flank too. Clem asked him what the difference was, he wanted to know what the names meant. S’pose the man thought he’d give us a tutorial. He was—friendly.” William paused and said again, “Yeah, he was trying to be friendly.”
As he pictured the proud, stocky man with watery eyes and huge cleaver in his hand, William effortlessly slipped into his thick midlands accent as he repeated the man’s words, “‘Well now, lads, see this ‘ere is supraspinatus—that’s chuck to yer layperson—and it comes out the muscle along yer shoulder blade.” Something of the feeling of muted horror that had captured the young William returned as he remembered the butcher with his blade, energetically marking over his apron the corresponding anatomy on his own body. “This ‘ere silverside is the hamstring from the back o’ yer thigh, and flank, that comes out yer abdomen.’” As William spoke the last words, he mimed running an imaginary butcher’s knife across his stomach and forcefully gutting it open.
As he made eye contact with Buffy, her mystified expression brought William back to the moment.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, was quite a memorable lesson.” He let out a rueful laugh. “After that, I picked at my plate all night. His parents thought I was disrespecting mum’s cooking. Made quite a bad impression.” Unsure of where to look, he picked up and drained the last of his soda.
“I take it you weren’t a regular at Sunday dinner?” Buffy asked, trying uncertainly for a levity she didn’t feel.
“No, I didn’t see him outside of school after that,” William replied as his hands absently crushed his empty metal can.
“Oh,” Buffy exclaimed softly.
“His father hadn’t met me before then and his mum already had me pegged for a yob since I was from a council estate. She wanted better friends for her son,” William explained dispassionately, as if it were a perfectly logical aim to pursue. Noticing as if for the first time the crumpled metal disc he held in his hands, he tossed it aside.
Buffy was trying to keep up with the significance of everything he was telling her. “What does that mean? Council—?”
“Public housing,” William said shortly, avoiding eye contact. Not wanting to say anymore on the matter, he hurriedly changed the subject. “Anyway, the whole thing taught me how effectively words obfuscate reality. Probably laid the seeds for my legal prowess,” he suggested, trying for an arrogance that eluded him. Turning back to his meal, he swallowed a bite of tofu whole but unable to quite let the subject go he then added, “Years later in school I learned that in German meat is ‘Fleisch,’ which would be ‘flesh’ in English. A lot more honest about the product, isn’t it?” he observed wryly.
“Oh, really? Yeah.” Buffy pondered that fact for a moment. “But they still eat it.”
“Yeah, I think sausage qualifies as their national pastime. Just goes to show, can’t count on people to do what’s right. Even when they know better.” He tossed the sentiment off carelessly, almost thoughtlessly, as he reached for his napkin.
The movement of his hand was arrested as his eyes met Buffy’s.
She was staring at him with a mixture of puzzlement and sympathy as she asked, “But people are all we have to count on, aren’t they?”
As Buffy stood before her kitchen stove, idly waiting for the teapot to boil for her evening cup of chamomile, her mind returned again to her strange and unexpected conversation with William at the diner. The indelible events of his childhood had left their own subdued impression on her. There was a glimmering sense of kinship that she was only partially aware of. Less remote was the vague sadness that overlaid it, stemming perhaps from the feeling of resignation he expressed about the exclusion he had experienced, or the lingering disappointment that laced his cynicism. She wondered when he had decided to leave England and come all the way to Los Angeles. She guessed he must have wanted to start over someplace totally new, someplace where being a foreigner would distract people from the past he sought to leave behind. She thought about how lonely it was to be cut off from others knowing you in that way, or even knowing you at all, maybe.
Du musst dein Leben ändern.. The final words of Rilke’s poem came to William as he stood staring unseeingly at his reflection in the glass of his office window long after nightfall. He hadn’t thought about Rilke in a long time, probably not since he had struggled through those translation assignments for Frau Wolf in sixth form. Rilke had never really appealed to William, his esoteric mysticism like a private code seemingly decipherable only to a priestly elect. And yet a few of the sonnets had broken through the overwrought lyricism of the whole, startling William with their emotive clarity. He had spent a long time working on the last stanza of that poem, his ekphrastic masterpiece. His final pass on it had earned him no love from his instructor, a dour woman from the former East Germany who found her English students as displeasing to her sensibilities as the English weather. No real fan of literature herself, she was far too literal-minded for William’s liking and it had been no surprise to him when she had particularly disdained his rendering of the penultimate line. Yet he had stubbornly stuck with his version, convinced it conveyed the right intention despite the liberties it took with the original. Thinking about it now, he paradoxically realized both how good it was, and how impoverished his sense of its meaning had been. For the first time, he understood the point was not to put oneself in the position of the detached speaker but to inhabit the position of the one who was being addressed. In Rilke’s case it was to open himself to the undying soul of a great work of art. But in his own? Was it to recognize that she was calling to him, at once unknowingly and inexorably?
He softly recited his line from memory.
“There is nowhere to hide, nothing here that does not see you.”