The Paper Grail Read Online Free Page A

your horn. I’ve hired this car, and I demand it.”
    “Why don’t you climb up here and honk it yourself, lady? Then
you
can talk to the cop.” He turned forward again, ignoring her. Opening the glove box, he found a pack of gum, pulling out two sticks and shoving them into his mouth, settling into his seat contentedly to wait out the tow truck, even if it took all afternoon.
    Mrs. Lamey leaned forward, unable to believe it. She had expected grief of some nature, but this sort of outright impudence from a driver … “I
insist.
Honk the horn or I’ll have your job.”
    “You can have the fuckin’ job, lady, and the horn, too. Calm the hell down. Where you going, anyway? Just up to North Beach. It’s easier to
walk
from here. If I was you, that’s what I’d do. I’d get out and walk. You’d have been there twenty minutes ago.”
    “Your advice is worthless to me, young man. Here, look, they’ve gotten out of the way. Pull around these cars, for heaven’s sake.” She waved a limp-wristed hand toward the street.
    He shrugged and edged the limousine past the tow truck, which had straightened out now and was towing the Mercedes out into traffic. They stopped and started a half dozen times down the last two blocks to Portsmouth Square, slowing in the press of cars swinging up onto Broadway and Columbus. Small gangs of youths lounged on the sidewalk along the square, shouting and smoking cigarettes.
    Mrs. Lamey carefully kept her eyes straight ahead. There was nothing here that she wanted to see. She felt vulnerable, even inside the limousine, but with a little bit of work she could ignore the world outside utterly. As they turned up Columbus, though, she saw three young men with weirdly miscut hair bend toward the limousine and make obscene gestures with both hands, all three of them laughing and hooting. Mrs. Lamey concentrated hard on the windshield, on the car ahead of them, on the tip of her nose, blocking out their existence, eradicating the whole brief scene.
    “That’s rich, ain’t it?” the driver said, chuckling in the front seat. “What it is, is the limo. Happens all the time. Can’t go nowhere without people flipping you off. You know what I mean? It’s a social statement is what I think.” He shook his head, clearly pleased, able to take the long view. “You got to admire it, though.” He looked at her wide-eyed in the rearviewmirror, as if inviting her to admire it as much as he did, to talk a little bit of philosophy.
    Mrs. Lamey was silent. There was nothing on earth she had to admire. Where she came from limousine drivers spoke when spoken to. They weren’t street-corner sociologists. He shook his head after a half minute of her refusing to speak, and they drove in silence up Columbus to Vallejo.
    She directed him up an alley between graffiti-scrawled brick façades. Midway down, the alley opened onto a courtyard. “Stop here,” she said suddenly.
    “Here?” He turned and looked at her incredulously, having expected, perhaps, some more reasonable destination.
    “That’s right. Here. In the alley. I won’t be needing your services any longer. I’m getting out here.
Can
you fathom that?”
    He shrugged. “Suits me.” He got out and went round to her door, opening it and gesturing gallantly at the littered asphalt.
    “I won’t be giving you a tip of any sort,” she said to him, staring at his chin with a look of determination. “I don’t know what you’re accustomed to, but I’ll tell you right now that I had thought at first to give you two dollars. You can ruminate on that for the rest of the afternoon. I’m moderately certain that I would have gotten quicker, more courteous service from a taxicab. One expects a certain amount of gracious behavior from a driver, a certain level of professionalism and expertise.”
    She took two steps to distance herself from him, then turned around to face him squarely. With an air of someone having the last word, she showed him the two