how to escape. I would do myself no favors by rushing. I was still in a cage, but a cage where I could move. I did not want to be back in the Polish prison.
And when I wasn’t serving drinks, I thought about Lucy and The Bundle.
One day in late March, I arrived a bit hurt. A bicycle courier had sideswiped me while crossing a street and I’d fallen, scraping my forearm. My shadows did nothing to help me. I rolled up my sleeve to keep the shirt clean and went into the front; it was early afternoon on a Saturday and only one customer sat along the bar.
She was a few years older than me, maybe thirty. Pretty but with eyes of hard quartz, a slash of a mouth. Her cheekbones would have made a photographer contemplate a next great shot. She wore black slacks and a dark sweater. Her hair was blondish, the color of fresh straw, and cut to just above her shoulders. She picked up her neat whisky, drank it carefully. She moved with precision. She was not looking at me but I thought she was entirely aware of me. My first thought was: She’s major trouble.
“Do you have a first-aid kit?” I asked Ollie.
“Yes, in my office.” Ollie sounded irritated. I’d interrupted a discussion between him and the woman. He jabbed a thumb at me. “This one. Runs like a maniac, bouncing off stairs and buildings and such. He’ll fall and break his neck and then I’ll be out a halfway decent bartender.” Ollie felt self-esteem to be overrated.
The woman surveyed me. “L’art du déplacement?” Her voice was low and cool, like a summer breeze coming out of a tree’s shadow, and she had an odd accent I couldn’t quite decipher. She was beautiful to look at—although I had no real eye for any woman but Lucy—but I did not like her.
But she’d used the original French name for parkour running. I nodded. “Are you a traceur?” I asked. A term for parkour runners, drawn from the French term for a special kind of bullet that leaves a trail.
“Oh, no. I used to live in Paris. I used to watch the kids trying parkour, running along the edges of buildings, throwing themselves from rooftop to rooftop, amazed that they didn’t break their legs.” She smiled the slash-smile again. “I wished I had their nerve, their fleetness.”
“I say if you want to run an obstacle course, get on a track.” Ollie poured more whisky in the woman’s glass, although she hadn’t asked.
“But life’s an obstacle course,” the woman said. “The runners run in the world we live in, not an artificial one.” She turned back to me. “I always thought they looked like animals.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“In their grace. Wolves on the street. Hunters. The runners looked to me like a pack, closing on prey.” The woman sipped her whisky. “I have a fondness for wolves.”
It was exactly the sort of bizarre comment you hear in a bar that would make no sense anywhere else but seems reasonable in dim light with the sting of booze on your lips. Ollie stared at the woman, auditioned an unsure smile, and decided to end the discussion of wolves with introductions. “Hey, Sam, this is Mila.”
Mila offered a hand. I shook it. “Are you a regular, Mila? I’m still learning who’s who in Ollie’s kingdom.”
“She’s a wandering regular. Stops in when she’s in town, which is only like three times a year. And then I can’t get rid of her for a week.” Ollie grinned. “She keeps wanting to buy the bar from me but you know I will never sell.”
“I can work on him for you,” I said with a polite bartender smile. “I’m sure he wants to retire to Florida.”
“Oh, God, no,” Ollie said. “New York till I die.”
“He won’t sell, but he listens to my proposals because he sells me a bottle’s worth of Glenfiddich during that week.” Mila kept her hands folded on the bar in front of her, primly.
“Nice to be able to travel,” I said.
“The world is a smaller place these days. Much smaller.” Mila shrugged—a small, elegant gesture. “Be careful on your parkour runs, Sam. Ollie will not spare the whip if you’re on crutches.”
“Sam I don’t need to whip. The others, Jesus, Mila, you can’t believe it. How hard is it to pour neatly and quickly and accurately into a glass? To pour? Gravity does the work. This is not surgery.