A plump woman with spiky ginger hair and an earful of rings parted with one of her cigarettes and Flavia returned triumphant to resume her place on the stool. Lorimer was glad of the opportunity to stare at her figure again, noting her height, the length of her legs, the ranginess of her stride and her slim, almost hipless body. Pretty much ideal, he thought, no complaints here.
‘So, you’re out of luck, Lorimer Black,’ she said.
‘I notice you didn’t describe yourself as a “happily” married woman.’
‘Goes without saying, doesn’t it?’
‘Does it?’
‘I would have thought so. You’re not married, I take it.’
‘No.’
‘In a “relationship”, then?’
‘Ah. Not any more.’
‘So what do you do at Fortress Sure? Sounds a deadly dull sort of life.’
‘I’m what they call a loss adjuster.’
‘Adjusting loss… Someone who “adjusts” loss…’ She thought about it. ‘That could be nice – or it could be fucking spooky.’ She looked shrewdly at him, narrowing her eyes. ‘Is your job meant to make people happy? People who’ve lost something, they call on you to adjust it, make the loss less hard to bear?’
‘Well, not exactly, I –’
‘As if their lives are broken in some way and they call on you to fix it.’
‘Not exactly,’ he said again, cautiously, unable to fix her tone – whether naïve or heavily ironic.
‘No. Sounds too good to be true, I think.’
Ironic, then, Lorimer thought. Profoundly.
He stared at her and she looked him back squarely in the eye. It was absurd, he thought, swiftly analysing his feelings, it was almost embarrassing, but true none the less: he could happily have sat there for hours simply staring at her face. He felt light, also, a thing of no substance, as if he were made of styrofoam or balsa wood, something she could cuff aside with the most casual of backhanders, toss him out of the Café Greco with the flick of a wrist.
‘Mmmm,’ she said, reflectively. ‘I suppose you’d like to kiss me.’
‘Yes. More than anything.’
‘You’ve got nice lips,’ she said, ‘and nice, tired eyes.’
He wondered if he dared lean forward and press his lips to hers.
‘And I might have allowed you to kiss me,’ she said, ‘if you’d taken the trouble to shave before coming out to meet me.’
‘Sorry.’ A useless word, he thought, for the awful regret he felt.
‘Do you ever tell lies, Lorimer Black?’
‘Yes. Do you?’
‘Have you ever told me lies? In our short acquaintance?’
‘No. Yes, well, a white lie, but I had good –’
‘We’ve known each other for about five minutes and you’ve already lied to me?’
‘I could have lied about it.’
She laughed at that.
‘Sorry I’m late, honeybun,’ a man’s voice said at his shoulder.
Lorimer turned and saw a tall man standing there, dark like him, fashionably dishevelled, older by five years or so. Lorimer took in, quickly, patchy stubble, long curly hair, a lean, handsome, knowing face, not kind.
‘Better late than never,’ Flavia said. ‘Lucky my old chum Lorimer was here, stop me dying of boredom.’
Lorimer smiled, sensing the man appraising him now, checking out the look, the presence, weighing him up, subtly.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever met Noon, have you, Lorimer?’
Noon?
‘No. Hi, Noon,’ Lorimer said, keeping his face straight. It wasn’t hard, he felt all the mass returning to his body, all his specific gravity, his avoir dupois.
‘Noon Malinverno, number one husband.’
Malinverno offered a lazy hello then turned back to Flavia. ‘We should go, sweetums,’ he said.
Flavia stubbed out her cigarette, wound her long scarf about her neck and shrugged on her jacket.
‘Nice to see you again, Lorimer,’ she said. Malinverno was already moving to the door, his eyes on them both. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to give me Paul’s number.’
‘Sure,’ Lorimer said, suddenly proud of her guile, taking up his pen and writing his telephone number, and his address, on the margin of a page of the Standard, which he tore off and gave to her. ‘Paul said call any time. Twenty-four hours a day’
‘Ta, ever so,’ she said, deadpan. As they left the Café Greco Malinverno put his arm around her neck and Lorimer turned away. He didn’t want to see them together in the street, husband and wife. He was not bothered that she had arranged for Malinverno to meet her there too – her insurance, he supposed – he nursed instead the warm glow of their conspiracy, their complicity. He knew they would see each other again – there is no disguising that charge of mutual attraction as it flickers between two people – and he