Free Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber Page A

walked toward the hotel bar, a place called Harry Cipriani's. It was a loud, lemon-colored room with lacquered wooden walls, full of low tables clustered together everywhere like toadstools. The air smelled like seafood and split-pea soup. Gobi went into stealth mode, assessing the patrons, until her gaze came to rest on an old man in a gray vintage tuxedo and a great cloud of wintry white hair, surrounded by several carafes of wine and a pile of dirty saucers. He had red, scaly ears that stuck almost straight out from his head, and he was pushing his long nose into a red wine glass, sniffing repeatedly and shaking his head, muttering under his breath, a comedic performance. Flanking him were two giggling young women that could have been his granddaughters but probably weren't.
    Gobi stood and waited while he looked up at her.
    "Hello?" His voice had a heavy Slavic accent that made it sound lower and more suspicious than he probably was. "What is it? Do we know each other?"
    "We might," Gobi said. "You are Milos Lazarova?"
    Now the suspicion sounded more genuine. "Who are you?"
    "So quickly you forget?" Gobi smiled, and I could almost hear the twinkle in her voice. "Your granddaughter Daniela and I were at university together in Prague. We had Christmas dinner at your palazzo in Rome. Surely you haven't forgotten me so soon."
    The old man gazed at her deeply and then shook his head, looking both flummoxed and charmed. "Forgive me. For the life of me, I cannot recall your name."
    "Tatiana Kazlauskieni." Gobi offered her hand, and Milos kissed it.
    "Please, sit." He turned his gaze to me, and without a word the two bimbo bookends that had been sitting on either side of him abruptly stood up and vanished. "You must introduce me to your lucky friend."
    Gobi smiled. "This is Perry. My fiancée."
    "Doubly lucky, then," Milos said, beaming, and gestured to the suddenly vacant chairs. "You must both join me. I insist."
    "We really can't—"
    "Thank you, how kind." Gobi jammed something hard into my spine, an elbow or a dagger or the barrel of a gun, and I sat down heavily, still feeling the old man's eyes on me. They were as brown as chestnuts, searching and soulful, with the depth of those of someone who'd lost something close to him and had never quite allowed himself to get over it.
    "The specialty of the house is the Bellini." Milos raised three fingers at a waiter without glancing away from us. "You must try it. Surely you know the origin of this bar."
    "I do not," Gobi said. Her eyes sparkled. "You must enlighten me."
    "Harry Cipriani is a near duplicate of Harry's Bar in Venice, famous watering hole of many American luminaries." Milos smiled, radiating a luxuriant, liquid happiness that seemed to saturate this entire corner of the bar. "In the early 1950s, I was down and out in Venice, living like a peasant." A slight nostalgic smile played at the corner of his lips. "I had just come to the end of an affair with a married woman, much to the ire of her husband, who happened to be a very influential Venetian businessman. Suffice it to say, it had not ended well for me." He chuckled, deep in the memory now, far beyond reach. "In any case, I walked into the Harry's Bar hoping for a glass of water and a crust of bread. I had perhaps five hundred lira in my pocket—the one pocket that did not have a hole in it. I half expected them to throw me out on the street." His eyes flicked upward for just a second, then returned to us. "When I walked in, there was an American holding court at the bar, a big bear of a man with a beard and a loud voice, surrounded by several reporters and sycophants. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. When he noticed me standing there in my shabby clothes, waiting to get the bartender's attention, he stopped in the middle of the story and asked who I was. I told him that I was no one, just a young man down on his luck. The loud American smiled—smiled with his eyes, you know, as if recognizing a