“Tell me what you want me to do,” he says, “and I’ll do it, I swear.”
“Well, first I want you to pay up,” Sassoon says, “because this is the last warning, unless you want this restaurant, your pride and joy, to become our restaurant. And then I want you to tell any of your friends who like to gamble with the rent money what can happen iftheydon’t pay in a prompt manner, just to save me the trouble of telling them myself. Can you do that for me, Martin?”
Somehow the man’s voice sounds as if he is purring.
“Yes.”
Martin’s own voice sounds thick, hoarse.
“Tell them that while they like the dirty pleasure ofgambling with people like us,” Sassoon continues, “they need to pay their debts, and promptly.”
Sassoon raises his right hand then. Martin can’t help himself. He flinches and feels himself redden.
But all Sassoon has done is reach across the table to pat him on top of his head.
“Dinner’s on you,” he says, then pushes back his chair, pats Martin on the head one more time, and walks out of Café Martin.
EIGHT
NORMA BANKS AND I finish our work by noon. We spend the morning talking more about the dream jury she’d like me to seat, the kind of technology and research she plans for the “whippersnappers” she has working for her, and she reminds me all over again that she doesn’t come cheap.
“I’m not in this for the love of the game,” she says but then, with the twinkle back in the eyes, adds, “Well, maybe a little bit.”
While we’re sitting in my car waiting for the Amagansett train to arrive, she says, “I’ve only been around you for a day, and even I can see you need to take better care of yourself.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“But one tough mother,” she says.
Just like that, another Aerosmith line pops into my head.
“Nine lives,” I sing, “feelin’ lucky.”
“Pretty sure you’ve gone blowing past nine by now,” Norma says.
“But who’s counting?” I ask.
She asks when we can next get together. I vaguely tell her in a few days, that I have to go out of town.
“You do know how soon jury selection starts, right?”
“I most certainly do.”
“Am I allowed to ask where you’re going?”
“No,” I say.
She shakes her head. “The tough mother here is you, Hummingbird,” she says.
Before she went to bed last night, I told her about my mother’s love of hummingbirds, her nickname for me, one Norma has already adopted as her own.
We hear the train then. She gets out of the car. But before she walks up the steps to the platform, she leans through my open window and kisses me on the cheek.
“You take care,” she says. “I mean it.”
“See there,” I say. “You do have a soft side.”
“Don’t let it get around,” she says.
