Dark Maze

predictable in a pub. But now with Picasso so inescapably on my mind, I studied what could only be his work. High on the wall behind the brass-railed mahogany bar at the front of Angelo’s Ebb Tide, there it had hung for so long: an oil painting of the owner himself, Angelo Cifelli, and a lone customer perched on a stool.
    The customer in the painting is a lady in a smart green dress. There is a coffee cup in a saucer, set down in front of her. She is wearing a hat, which is something women used to do. Her legs are interestingly crossed and she is talking to the barman’s wide round back. Which belongs to Angelo, in his black silk vest and his white shirt rolled at the sleeves and his fringe of black hair and the unmistakable profile of his great Roman nose. He is bent to the task of rinsing glasses in a sink full of hot water.
    Now, as I stepped into the Ebb Tide, muzzy from my recent unsettling encounter in the park, I studied not only the painting overhead but the almost identical real-life scene.
    A lady in a dark green dress drank coffee and chatted at Angelo as he rinsed glasses. She wore a hat with a feather. Sunlight floated in through Venetian blinds and shone kindly on her face. From where I stood at the door, she looked nearly young and beautiful and high-spirited; she seemed to be telling Angelo a story from a time when she was young and beautiful and high-spirited.
    She would have continued, but when Angelo spotted me he gave me a very big and noisy hello. The lady stopped talking, turned my way, and smiled.
    I sat down on a stool a few over from hers. I inspected her, of course—she and her twin in the painting. I had come to the Ebb Tide all decided on having only a Molson ale since it was not quite noon. But now that things were even more i off-balance than they were before I arrived, I told Angelo with some embarrassment in my voice that I would like my regular. Which is a shot of Johnnie Walker red, followed by the Molson.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Angelo said. “You’ve had earlier starts at it than this.” He set me up and then, by way of friendly bartenderish introductions, he said to his only two customers, “Hock, Celia. Celia, Hock.”
    I started by telling Celia that I was sorry for interrupting her story. Angelo told her quickly, “You ought to know that Hock here is a cop, but he’s all right.”
    Celia did not say anything. The little feather on the side of . her hat began shaking happily, then she tipped her head back aways and laughed. Her voice was scratchy from whiskey and cigarettes and at close range the light on her face no longer flattered. I noticed a fresh packet of Chesterfields tucked inside her pocketbook, which was unclasped and lying on the bar next to her cup and saucer. Also I noticed it was not coffee in the cup, it was milk.
    She said to Angelo, “Oh, don’t worry, baby. You know I’ve been out of circulation about a hundred years, way past the statute of limitations anyway.” Then she turned my way and said, “Look here, Officer Hock, I only dropped by to see my longtime pal Angelo. And so here we are just talking over the old days when I made a good dishonest living, and how ; what’s happened to me since is a crime.”
    I smiled and said nothing.
    She crossed her legs and smiled back and it was an easy thing to see how she had once been young and beautiful. She picked open her Chesterfields and Angelo lit her. She smoked while her hazel eyes combed through me. Her green dress was made out of something smooth and yielding, and so was her hat with the delicate feather. The ensemble did a fine job of softening Celia’s hardening edges.
    I asked if I could buy her another cup of milk.
    She declined. Then by way of enlightening me, she said tonelessly, “Ulcers. About five o’clock, though, I usually pep it up with Scotch. As I have told my doctor, ulcers is a daytime sickness.”
    “Does the doctor buy that?”
    “He says to me, ‘Celia, if that’s the way you feel, then why not forget the milk altogether and just drink your booze from morning to night and blow up your guts and be done
    with it?’ ”
    Angelo said, “Maybe under certain circumstances that’s good medical advice. I mean, waiting around for some merciful god to do it to you natural is unfair as hell.”
    He returned to his glasses. I asked Celia, “You mentioned something about a crime?”
    “Oh, you want to hear about that, really?”
    “Sure,” I said. And I heard a funny