Ring of Truth (27 page)
Tara Keegan had everything perfectly balanced, her muni card in her right hand, her workhorse monogram designer tote on her shoulder, and in her left hand a paper sack with a take out cup of morning dark roast and a pair of clean socks for her friend Eddie. The morning fog swirled up from the bay, pressing her gray suit slacks to her legs. The damp January streets gleamed with long streaks of red and green from the changing traffic lights, a reminder of the fading holiday season.
Tara's fellow commuters bent over their phones, caught up in their wired worlds. Only one person in the early morning crowd was looking about, a woman unfamiliar to Tara, a blonde in a trendy lilac-colored trench coat with the sort of looks that Hitchcock preferred in his heroines. The woman had no phone or purse or electronic device. She had an expectant manner, not wary, but on the lookout for something. It occurred to Tara that the woman was happy, not just good mood happy, but profoundly happy, inner peace kind of happy, reach the top of the mountain happy.
Tara stole another glance at her, trying to imagine what would bring out that happy glow in a woman. Some form of yoga or meditation? Endorphins from a dawn Boot Camp session? Of course, the woman might be in a relationship, but obviously not the usual sort of rent-and-space-sharing arrangement that passed for commitment in San Francisco. And surely, she was not on her way to a six-figure, sixty-hour-a-week job in the bro-culture tech world. Perhaps she was an artist, although clearly not a starving one. Her hands were in her pockets, so Tara could not see whether the woman wore a ring.
Tara, of course, had the perfect job, as a concierge at the Hotel Belmont, a boutique hotel on the north side of Nob Hill. She had found her calling, welcoming tourists to her favorite city and making sure that they enjoyed its hills and views, its endless good restaurants, its history, and its mix of elegant sophistication and Bohemian zaniness. At work she had everything at her fingertips to solve visitors' problems and make their stay more enjoyable.
The inbound cable car came clattering up the hill, cresting Beach Street and rolling to a stop right on schedule. As Tara stepped forward, one of the regulars at her stop, a skinny, twenty-something man in designer tortoise-rim dark glasses, ear buds disappearing under his black hoodie, suddenly looked up from his phone and lunged for the car, cutting Tara off. She dodged to the right to avoid being sideswiped, and the heel of her pump went down in a gap in the pavement. Her ankle rolled. Her bag slipped off her shoulder. Nearly twenty pounds of essentials landed with bruising force on the crook of her arm. She felt herself toppling sideways, her left hand flying up, the paper sack with Eddie's steaming coffee swinging wildly. She pictured the full disaster, saw herself pitching forward under the wheels, the heavy car slipping back before the brakeman could stop it, the iron wheels rolling over her. She could see the headlineâ
Cable Car Amputates Hands of Woman Unbalanced by Handbag
. She would never again pet a dog, send a text, or bring Eddie his coffee.
As fast as the images came, a hand grabbed her left elbow, arresting her fall. Straightening, she turned to see the calm blonde woman, holding her elbow, her grip surprisingly strong.
The woman smiled, her eyes alight with a gleam of satisfaction. She seemed to be having an “aha” moment, as if Tara were the solution to a puzzle, the missing clue to the
Times
Saturday crossword, the Higgs Boson particle. The genuine warmth of that smile was startling in a city known for people whose only means of connecting was a click on Tinder or a response to a Craig's List ad.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked.
Tara nodded. “Thank you.” Usually, Tara was the giver of help, not the receiver, but she had her balance again, disaster avoided, and she hadn't spilled Eddie's coffee.
“Your bag must weigh twenty pounds.” Again there was that sympathetic smile. The woman released Tara's arm as the others at the stop boarded.
“You planning to go to work today, girl?” the conductor called.
Tara put one foot on the wide running board.
“Wait!” The woman dipped a hand into the pocket of her trench coat. “I have something for you.” Out came a ring box of scuffed burgundy leather. “Take this. Read everything. Trust me. It will change your life.” She tucked the box in Tara's jacket pocket.
Tara just had time to crook her elbow around a pole before the car lurched into motion. She swung around to look back at the woman on the pavement, still standing there with that satisfied smile.
“My life is fine,” she called over the clatter of the cable car.
“You'll see. Don't let your bag hold you back.” The woman waved a friendly goodbye. Then she turned and slipped around the corner into the fog.
Tara leaned slightly, feet braced, adjusting to the slant of the car with its uphill angle. Two things puzzled her, about which she could not satisfy her curiosity while the cable car rattled along at its nine-mile-an-hour pace. She wanted to know what was in the box, and why the woman had picked her to receive it.
The woman hardly had the look of a terrorist, at least not the media's idea of a terrorist in a black ski mask and camo gear, and the box that rested against Tara's hip didn't tick or vibrate like an explosive device. Still,
life-changing
seemed a stretch. And as Tara was hardly in need of a life makeover, she found the woman's urgency and her words as curious as the box itself.
Her training kicked in as she reviewed the incident. As a concierge Tara made it a practice to listen between the lines, as it were, to figure out what clients were really asking. That's why the woman's comments about Tara's bag puzzled her. She had basically warned Tara that her bag, her favorite bag, was in her way. Tara had to disagree. Her bag made her better equipped for disaster than an astronaut headed for the space station, or explorers headed for the eight-thousand-foot depths of the Chevé cave system in Oaxaca. When disaster struck, Tara could always pull something out of her bag to save the day.
In Tara's experience one had to be prepared because disaster never came with plenty of warning, like an axe murderer in a slasher flick while the power was out, thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, and the heroine descended alone down the dark, creaking stairs of a deserted farmhouse toward the unexplained noise in the basement as the whole audience silently screamed,
Don't go there!
Oh no, disaster came on sunny days, when things were going well, and your guard was down. A smart person knew how to be ready. A smart person had a safety pin, a flashlight, a Band-Aid, spot cleaner, mace, or a pair of chopsticks that could be pressed into service to save the day. Tara always carried chopsticks in her bag. In fact, she had developed a system that was way ahead of airport security. Her bag was perfectly organized with what she liked to think of as her “kits,” zippered clear plastic containers, ready for any and all emergencies.
Within minutes the cable car reached the top of its climb and turned east along Washington Street. At her stop Tara hopped off and headed for the hotel at her usual brisk pace, the mystery box bouncing against her hip with her stride. A few doors from the black and gold awning of the Hotel Belmont, where a narrow alley opened to the back entrances of several buildings, she knew she'd find Eddie cocooned in his drab green sleeping bag under a cardboard shelter.
San Francisco had an uneasy relationship with its street people. Churches sheltered them, non-profits fed and trained them, ER rooms treated them, the police periodically cleared them from the latest up-and-coming neighborhood, and tourists and business people tried
not
to see them. But Eddie wasn't some random homeless person; he was her friend.
Tara had met him her first day on the Belmont job. That day he'd been rolling up his sleeping bag and tucking it into a well-worn backpack, looking like an out-of-place mountain hiker, an urban Ansel Adams, with his wide-brimmed canvas hat. She put his age at pushing fifty with his lined and weathered face, his full graying beard and mustache, his bright eyes, and his squashed nose that hooked like a backwards J.
He had sized her up instantly. “Running away from home?”
The question had caught her off guard. “On my way to work.” She had started to wish him a good day, not wanting to be rude, but inclined to move on without engaging, when he'd fallen into step with her, shouldering his pack.
“Then what's with the
suitcase
you're carrying? It looks like you have all your worldly belongings with you.”
“Just a few items for emergencies.”
He had glanced at her bag again. “What sort of emergency are you expecting? Earthquake? Terrorist attack? Alien invasion? You look like you're good to shelter in place for a month.”
He made her laugh.
“I can definitely get through a rough day.”
“You an EMT?”
She had laughed again. “A concierge at the Belmont.” She had wanted to share her new job excitement with someone now that her grandmother was gone.
Their path brought them to the corner across from the Belmont. As they waited for the light, Tara could not help admiring the hotel, once the modest palace of an early twentieth century millionaire. It had been built after the devastating 1906 earthquake and restored by the Dorset Hotel Group in the '90s.
“You'll be fine if you roll with the punches.”
Eddie's comment made her stop and look at him more carefully. He sounded like her grandmother. “What makes you so sure?” she'd asked him.
“Lots of punches.” He pointed to his squashed nose. “Lots of rolling.”
The light changed, and she started across the street, but Eddie didn't move.
“Just don't let that George scare you,” he advised. He waved and turned away.
George, it turned out was the Hotel Belmont doorman, a figure of imposing grandeur. He and Eddie were opposites in appearance, if not in character. George, all polish and no nonsense from his top hat and overcoat with its gold shoulder bars to his white gloves and taxi whistle, ruled the pavement in front of the Belmont and indeed the whole block. Nothing disturbed the Belmont's guests as he greeted them or saw them off on excursions round the city.
Since that first morning, meeting Eddie had become a ritual. He had places to go during the day, but he liked to return to his North Beach haunts to sleep.
When Tara turned into the alley where Eddie was currently camping, she found him still under his damp cardboard roof, the end of his sleeping bag just visible behind a low iron gate at the foot of the back steps of a pale green Victorian townhouse wedged between a pair of newer brick condos. A string of foggy days, rare for January, had deepened the damp chill in the alley.
She set the bag of coffee and socks on the step below the gate and knocked on the wall. “Your wake-up call, sir.”
Eddie liked to say that he needed just two things in the morningâgood black coffee, and clean socks. “You've got to take care of your feet. You're on âem all day.”
When he didn't wake to her greeting, Tara lingered, wanting to be sure he was okay before she left him. She wasn't due at the hotel until the morning staff meeting.
She glanced up and down the alley, seeing only fog and damp. No one was about. Eddie liked to be up and gone before most people were stirring. He had a theory that he was repurposing San Francisco's only excess housing capacity by sleeping in doorways while homeowners were away.
“Hey, it's unused housing space, and it can house me for a while and save a shelter bed for someone who really needs it.”
What surprised Tara was that Eddie was pretty good at figuring out when people were away. On top of that he had dozens of survival strategies for using the city itself. In exchange for a shower, he did errands for a fellow vet who was wheelchair bound, and he had two luxuries, a PO box at a friendly postal annex site in the Embarcadero and a library card. He knew where to take a safe daytime nap, and where to store his few possessions, and he could sell the $1
Street Sheet
to San Francisco's movers and shakers in their thousand dollar suits with Rolexes on their wrists.
She hesitated, unsure whether to wake him or not when he stirred and stretched. He gave her a hoarse croak of a good morning and reached for the coffee through the wrought iron gate.
“Are you okay?” She couldn't really judge in the gray gloom.
He took his first swig of coffee. “Sure. Did you break up with that absentee boyfriend of yours yet?”
“Nope.”
Eddie asked about Tara's boyfriend nearly every time they met, and Tara had yet to confess that Justin Wright was the perfect boyfriend because he was pure fiction, an invention of Tara's own fertile imagination. She had invented Justin after her relationship with her college boyfriend Daniel flamed out in their late twenties, and a series of very bad Internet match-ups had left her feeling that she had no clue how to handle the post-college dating scene. Justin had been with her ever since. Or not
with
her, as she'd made him a consultant, always on the move to different client sites, usually foreign.
“Where's he off to this week?”
“He's got a consulting job in Sweden.” That got Eddie's attention. Her remark caught him mid-sip, and he had a brief coughing fit before he could speak again.
“Sweden! Sweden! He can't take you anywhere while he's in Sweden. No
tapas
at Bocadillo's or drinks at the Top of the Mark looking out over the bay. What good is he?”
“Eddie, he's got to make a living.”
“Dump him, Tara girl. The guy must have a suitcase for a heart. Go out with my guy. I'm telling you Jack is the one for you. Just say the word, and I'll connect you two.”
“Thanks for thinking of me, Eddie, and I'll hold you to that promise about your Jack. He'll be my ace in the hole if things don't work out with Justin.”