Round Robin (21 page)

Manfred didn’t know about the brochure. He didn’t find the gomer amusing and got up from the table where he and Bianca had seated themselves.

Robin sat him back down with a single deadly look.

The gomer’s pals saw the look, too, and turned pale.

But by the time the gomer turned around to face her again, Robin had stepped forward into the in–your–face space and was smiling.

“That’s pretty funny, Clem,” she said, handing the man his turkey sandwich.

“My name ain’t Clem.”

“Okay, Jethro then.”

Southern guys were pushovers, Robin knew. Sitting ducks. All you had to do was get them going about their names, their heritage, their twang.

The gomer’s response was prefect. He pushed his overcoat back to reveal a “Hi, I’m...” name tag on his lapel. Made a big deal of it, like he was the chief of police flashing his badge.

“See what it says, see right there?”

Robin’s smile widened. These guys were so easy.

“Cletus,” Robin said. “Cletus Bob?”

The gomer’s eyes narrowed.

“Cletus Raymond Urbanville-Duplessy, Regional General Manager,” the gomer said through clenched teeth, grabbing his sandwich.

Bianca watched raptly. As did Manfred.

For a moment, Robin was unable to speak. She just stood there shaking with repressed laughter. She had to put a hand on the counter to steady herself.

“What’s so damn funny?” the gomer asked.

Robin wiped tears of mirth from her eyes.

“Your initials, C-R-U-D.” Robin could restrain herself no longer. She laughed in the gomer’s face. “Your parents must have known what was coming.”

The gomer turned purple.

Robin looked at the gomer’s tag-alongs.

“That what you boys call your regional general manager when he isn’t around, CRUD? You get home after a long day, you have to wash the CRUD off?”

The gomer whirled on his underlings, and more than one guilty face looked back at him and turned red at Robin’s dead-on reading.

Robin wasn’t done yet.

While the gomer still had his back to her, she said, “You print up your business cards that way? CRUD, a real down-to-earth kinda guy?”

Murder flashed in the gomer’s eyes — but then he noticed the look someone was giving him, saw just how big that someone was, big enough that he should have been continued on the next two or three guys. Cletus Raymond Urbanville-Duplessy decided to live to fight another day. Back home. Where the odds were decidedly more to his liking.

Squishing the turkey sandwich he held in his hand, he stormed out.

Without paying.

Mimi’s cop-on-duty went after him.

Well, the brochure did mention that visitors tried their luck with Robin at their own risk.

David Solomonovich came in at three o’clock, after the fun was over and the crowd had finally thinned. He was anxious but not eager. He walked like a man being prodded up the steps to the gallows.

Robin, who’d been expecting David, met him just inside the door, took his hand, squeezed it hard enough to let him know there would be no escape and led him to the table where Manfred and Bianca sat.

“Manfred, Bianca, I’d like you to meet my friend David Solomonovich. David, this is Manfred Welk and his daughter Bianca Krump.”

David tugged his hand free, but he didn’t run. He bowed politely, and Robin noted with some amazement his bow was an exact duplicate of Manfred’s.

“Herr Welk, Fraülein Krump,
guten tag.”

“You speak German?” Robin asked, surprised.

David nodded. “Of course, it’s one of the great languages of Western intellectual thought. I speak German and French.”

Manfred watched the exchange closely, wondering if this was a set piece rehearsed for his benefit. He rattled off a string of German at the boy.

Robin didn’t understand a word of it, but at the end of Manfred’s little speech she saw David stiffen.

“Yes,” David said in English. “I am a Jew.”

Christ, Robin thought, please don’t tell me Manfred’s a bigot.

Manfred smiled and resumed in English. “I ask because I once thought of converting to Judaism.”

“What?” David asked.

What, Robin wondered.

“Yes, I studied your religion quite seriously for almost a year.”

“Did ... did you convert?”

Manfred shook his head.

“No. In the end, I discovered that my motivation was an act of rebellion and not of faith. But I came to admire what I’d learned of a people who’d persevered in their faith despite thousands of years of relentless persecution. I have the greatest respect for such fortitude.”

Manfred stood and gave David a perfect bow.

The boy was greatly ashamed that he’d ever considered Manfred nothing but a brainless hulk, and, though it hurt him to concede the fact, he could see already that Manfred would be perfect for Robin. He also knew that he’d do whatever he could to see that they got together.

Manfred turned sideways and gestured to his daughter.

“I’m told you would like to introduce my daughter to the sights and culture of your city.”

David looked at Bianca. She was kind of cute, even with the goofy blue hair, but she was just a kid. Practically a baby.

But he couldn’t forget that Robin was right, she was closer in age to him than he was to Robin — the woman he’d been fantasizing about. So maybe a spell of babysitting was just what he deserved.

“It would be my pleasure,” David said.

“Bianca?”

Bianca didn’t look at her father, only nodded.

She couldn’t take her eyes off of David.

Geeky, bespectacled, brilliant David.

Suddenly, the teenaged man of an eight-year-old’s dreams.

Bianca had fallen in love.

Which Robin recognized immediately, making her uneasy that she’d started something that might end up very badly.

Chapter 19

Despite Robin’s fears, the next several weeks passed quietly. Winter had arrived in earnest four weeks before the calendar said it was due. But after the town had been hit by its initial blizzard no one was really surprised. To Robin, it looked like it would be an in-law winter: the kind that arrived on your doorstep unexpectedly and lingered far longer than anyone wanted. Still, the coming of the cold and the snow seemed to bring a comfortable routine to Robin’s house, one that, like winter, would last for the foreseeable future.

Robin went to work everyday, sliced and diced anyone who challenged her, and continued her buyout plan with Mimi. The gomer who’d been sent home with his tail between his legs had written a letter of complaint about her that the
Trib
had published. Iggy Gross had picked up on it briefly, commenting that he soon might have to open a hospice for all of Robin’s victims. Tone was still on the air with the radio idiot, and had managed to get his grunts down into the alto range. Judy Kuykendahl and a group of feminists took umbrage at the Iggy-and-Tone act and offered to come to Robin’s aid with a publicity counter-offensive. Robin declined, making more enemies.

Manfred continued coaching, baking, and being the best dad he knew how. He also managed to persuade Bianca to help with snow removal and other household maintenance. He kept improving the building, painting the entire front stairwell and re-carpeting the stairs. He also bought Bianca a harmonica and was teaching her how to play the blues.

Robin saw much of what he did, and asked him if he ever slept.

Manfred said that five years of enforced idleness in prison had left him with a great hunger to be active. In fact, he liked to work more than he liked to eat. Robin said she thought he liked the two equally.

Bianca became a curtsying fool. She curtsied to everyone for every reason imaginable. Manfred beamed every time he saw her do it. After a while, though, seeing Bianca curtsy had become so commonplace to Robin that she no longer noticed ... except every once in a while the kid would give her this sneaky look and make this funny little groan, like she was constipated or something. Bianca continued working with Nancy, and did a heck of a job filing and bringing the Realtors their coffee and tea. The only hitch had come when one busybody do-gooder client had reported Bianca to the Department of Children and Family Services, saying that the kid should be in school and not on the job. A quick, discreet intervention by the CIA secured Bianca’s place in the workforce.

The kid was more smitten than ever with David, and as far as Robin could see he liked her, too — in an entirely appropriate way, of course. He’d taken Bianca to the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Art Institute, several other museums, and to the CSO’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s
Peter and the Wolf.
It was a program of acculturation of which Manfred entirely approved and encouraged.

Even Robin’s trepidation eased when she saw the two of them come into Mimi’s in the afternoons and jabber away in German while they ate. Many times, when Robin was scorching somebody good, the kid would watch her closely and then question David about the nuances of what she’d just seen. Robin thought the kid had come to respect her more, having seen her work. She didn’t like Robin any better, curtsies or no, but there was more respect, and for Robin that was enough.

Other times, Robin would look over and see David seeming to hang on Bianca’s every word. She figured that he was just being very polite, a really good listener, because, after all, what could an eight-year-old tell a genius who had more information stuffed into his head than you could find in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Robin had forgotten, or maybe it never occurred to her, that Bianca could tell David what it was like to live in a brothel. She could tell him many a strange tale about what went on among the denizens of those nether precincts. She could tell him what the girls really enjoyed, and what made them laugh at the customers behind their backs. She could and she did.

At first, David had resisted. To hear such things from such a young girl seemed depraved. But after he made it clear that there would be no hanky-panky between them — and not just because he’d be mortally afraid of her father — and after Bianca had insisted on telling him her stories anyway, he found the idea of this personal tutorial irresistible.

David knew that with Robin lost to him he would start wanting to see girls his own age soon — in the next few years anyway — and knowing at least some of the things he should never attempt with them would be useful. He’d have to make allowances for cultural and moral relativities, of course, but he felt Bianca was giving him a course in sex education unlikely to be offered at any university, and that was far more than he ever bargained for in this relationship.

Bianca knew that she wouldn’t have physical sex with David — not until she was a teenager. But she knew that he was brilliant and that someday he would be a wealthy and powerful man, and her mother had always told her that women must be on the lookout for such men. Taking control of them was how a woman made her way in the world. Bianca thought that David would be tiring of his first wife just about the time she came into full flower.

Besides all her calculations, Bianca honestly thought David was cute. Someday she would make him hers. In the meantime, she did what she could. She talked dirty to him.

And everybody who saw the two of them chatter together thought they were so cute.

Except Nancy.

Nancy knew kids and she knew human nature. At Thanksgiving, Nancy invited Manfred, Bianca and David, along with Robin and Dan Phinney, to come to her house for dinner. As the two youngest, Bianca and David sat at the foot of the table, speaking softly in German and laughing at regular intervals.

“I’d sure like to know what those two are talking about,” Nancy said.

She quietly asked Manfred if he could hear their conversation. Manfred said it would not be polite to eavesdrop, and for him that was the end of the subject. Still, Nancy might have pursued it further if Dan Phinney hadn’t grabbed everyone’s attention by making a comment that maybe it was time he and Manfred went out and started looking for some girls together.

Patty Phinney was not at the table to pass judgment on this idea as she was following her tradition of giving thanks in Cozumel while working on her winter tan.

Dan had spent the past several Sunday afternoons down in Manfred’s apartment drinking beer and introducing the immigrant to the joys of watching the Chicago Bears. When Dan had explained the size and the objectives of the opposing linemen, Manfred did, in fact, become interested in the game, appreciating runs and passes in the context of blocks and tackles performed by men who were approximately his own size. Seized by Dan’s enthusiasm, he soon became a fan of the home team.

Dan and Manfred had become buddies.

Now Robin’s father was suggesting they carouse together.

Robin’s heart did a flip-flop ... and to her great surprise she was more concerned that Manfred would find a girlfriend than her father would. This was surprising because, after all, neither of them had a claim on the other. They were friends, and that was certainly more than Robin had ever expected. Well, they did also work out together. Robin was getting strong, and she appreciated that. So that did give another dimension to the relationship. But, really, there was nothing remotely romantic going on between them. So why should she ...

Feel so relieved when Manfred blushed at the table and said he was much too busy for that sort of thing. And ...

Feel so grateful later when she overheard Nancy read her father a whispered riot act about daring to think of anyone but Robin for Manfred.

Robin didn’t know why she should feel either of these things ... but she did.

And life rolled on toward Christmas.