The Paper Grail Read Online Free

and rave and it wouldn’t get them to their destination one moment sooner. And the hired driver wouldn’t care anyway. She could buy the limousine service and have the man fired and he wouldn’t care. Her insisting on justice would simply provoke abuse. Despite his snappy uniform, he was sullen and dull and false-looking. She could see it in his eyes. She could take the measure of a man in an instant. In her sixty-eight years on earth she had learned to do that with a facility that she was proud of. It was the key to her success as a businesswoman.
    People weren’t what they used to be. The tradespeople didn’t keep to their stations. Duty was a thing of the past. Everywhere she went people were full of abuse. There was trouble of some sort from almost everyone she ran into. She seemed to remember a time in the distant past when that wasn’t so, when people and life were simple and direct. When that had changed, she couldn’t at all say.
    Before the war she had almost married a sailor. She remembered how handsome he had looked in his uniform on the day he shipped out. On the night before, they had danced to Benny Goodman. Now his bones were on the bottom of the ocean somewhere, and that’s what life had to offer you ultimately—death and disappointment. The world hadn’t changed in that respect. People had, though. Now there was nothing but grasping, peopleclawing their way through life at your expense. A person had no choice but to get in ahead of them. There was no middle ground. She stayed home as much as she could, but even there she was forced to carry on a war with a lot of backwoods hicks who didn’t know progress when they saw it, or destiny, either.
    Her mouth set and her eyes narrowed, she sat in the center of the backseat and stared straight ahead out the front window, trying not to see the awful gaggle of people swarming on the sidewalks and in the gutters. She believed that there was a certain dignity in her face, which was long and thin and with a prominent chin and the eyes of a monarch—the sort who saw straight through her subjects and their pitiful little games. There was nothing weak in her face, nothing watery. It was the sort of face that wasn’t easily forgotten. She peered at herself in the window reflection now, refastening a strand of hair that had come loose.
    Her attention was broken by the high-pitched shouting of an old Chinese news vendor, arguing, probably, over a nickel. At the curb the rear door of a van swung open and a man stepped out carrying a flayed goat over one bloody shoulder and a string of plucked ducks over the other. Life, like so much scurrying vermin, went on around her. She thought for the sixth time how necessary it had been to hire a limousine. Then she realized they were stopped again, and she checked her watch. “I’m
very
late,” she said to the driver, who said nothing in return.
    The traffic cleared just then, as if it, at least, were paying attention to her. The car moved forward slowly, making nearly a half a block’s worth of headway before stopping again. The lights of a tow truck whirled in front of them now, blocking oncoming traffic while the tow truck driver walked around an illegally parked Mercedes-Benz, looking in the windows. He pulled a clutch of flat plastic slats out of his coat and slipped one in along the edge of the front door of the parked car in order to jimmy it open, a policeman directing the cars around it, holding the limousine at bay with an upturned hand.
    Skeptically Mrs. Lamey watched them work. Nothing was safe from them. Even the police would steal your car. “Honk the horn,” Mrs. Lamey said to the driver.
    “At the cop?” He turned and looked at her.
    “Just
honk the horn,
young man. I’ve been patient with you up until now, but this takes it too far. Honk the horn.”
    The driver squinted into her face. “You gotta be kidding,” he said.
    “I never
kid
, if I take your meaning. I assure you I’m very serious. Honk