The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,67

had gone the way of the Drumnadrochit, so I took a sip and set about acquiring it all over again. Slow sipping, that’s the way to do it. You take little sparrow-sized sips, and you keep telling yourself you like the taste, and by the time you get to the bottom of the glass, it’s true.

I took a first sip, and thought Yes, that’s Laphroaig, all right. I’d forgotten what it tastes like, but that’s it, and I’d know it anywhere. Later I took a second sip, and was able to decide how I felt about the taste. I decided that I didn’t like it. Somewhere around the fifth sip, it had achieved the virtue of familiarity. I was accustomed to it, and the question of whether I actually liked it no longer seemed pertinent. It was like, say, a cousin. The man’s your cousin, for God’s sake! What do you mean, you don’t like him? You don’t have to like or dislike him. He’s your cousin!

I was almost ready for a sixth sip of Cousin Laphroaig when a woman marched up to the bar and settled herself on a seat two stools from mine. It was getting on for two in the morning, but she looked as though she’d just come from the office. She was wearing a pants suit of charcoal gray flannel, and her dark hair was done up in a knot on the top of her head, and you already know who she was, but it took me a minute, because the last time I saw her—the only time I saw her—she had her hair down and her clothes off and her mouth open.

The big blonde knew her, and knew her drink. “Hi,” she said. “G and T?”

“Heavy on the G,” the brunette said. “Just a splash of T.”

“You got it. Little late for you, isn’t it?”

I was watching out of the corner of my eye, so I didn’t actually see the brunette roll hers, but I think she probably did. “I didn’t think I was going to get here at all,” she said, “and I was starting to wonder if you did takeout.”

“I don’t think the State Liquor Authority would go for that.”

“I wonder if the time is right for a test case?” By now the gin and tonic was mixed and on the bar before her, and she took it up and put away more in one swallow than I’d managed in my five delicate sips. “Ahhhh,” she said, with real appreciation. “I needed that. Sigrid, back in the days before you decided on a career behind the stick—”

“Hold it right there, huh? Being a bartender’s not a career, and I didn’t decide on it.”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not. Nobody does, not in New York. You decide on a career in the arts, and you wait tables to make ends meet, and it begins to dawn on you that bartenders make more money and don’t have to work as hard, plus they never get yelled at for dropping a whole tray of pasta dishes on a table full of people from Ridgeway, New Jersey—”

“Did that happen to you?”

“No, but it could have. So you go take the course at the American Bartenders School, which isn’t exactly rocket science, and you get a job when you graduate, and you mix martinis and screwdrivers, which isn’t exactly brain surgery, and you quit when the boss puts his hand up your skirt—”

“Did that happen?”

“No, but it could have. So you get another job, and you finally find a place where they treat you right, and one day you notice you haven’t been on an audition or a go-see in months, and for a while you feel guilty about it, and then you feel guilty that you don’t, and then that’s it, you’re a lifer, you’ll be mixing Salty Dogs and Harvey Wallbangers until the cows come home. But that doesn’t make it a career.”

“Wow.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid said. “Way too much information, huh?”

“No, actually it was pretty interesting.” She drank some more of her gin and tonic, and I seized the moment to take a sip of my Laphroaig. It was definitely improving.

“I don’t know what got me started,” Sigrid said. “Except it’s been a long night, and it didn’t help that there was a guy hitting on me about an hour ago.”

“Oh, come on. That must happen to you all the time.”

“It does, but most of them take no for an answer, and the rest generally take fuck