The café was called Sheila’s Snack Bar and it served liquor. Eddie Brock Oldstein preferred scotch. I ordered a Coca-Cola for the first time since returning from the war. I was angry at the soda company for allowing their German CEO to produce Fanta beverages to get around the spirit of the embargoes America had set up against the Nazis. But my protest took a back seat to the fact that I needed something unnaturally sweet to cut the fear that a natural force like Brock instilled.

I sipped on my soda and Brock downed his whiskey in one gulp.

After he’d gestured for a refill I asked, “What’s your problem with me, man?”

“Who said I had a problem?”

“You come up to my office in the early morning with two thugs. That’s a problem.”

“I thought you were up there,” he said.

“So? What you got against me? I’ont even know you.”

“My money in your pocket.”

“You haven’t paid me a dime.”

“Not what I owe but what was stolen from me.”

“Why would you think I had anything belonged to you?”

“Because you were working for that worthless piece’a shit Kilian.”

Were.

“Look, man,” I said. “Craig came to me with some crazy story about a man and a woman fightin’ in the woods. He said that he thought he killed the man and wanted to find out if that was the case and if the woman was okay. I looked into it and couldn’t even prove that anything had happened. That’s it. Period. No money. No even mention of you or anybody like you.”

The waitress, probably not Sheila, brought Brock his second drink.

He held the glass up to his chin and stared at me like a hunter might spy quarry mostly hidden by a thick scrim of woods. No clear shot yet, his finger was still on the trigger.

“If you didn’t know what Kilian was up to, then how’d you find me?” He posed the question with misplaced arrogance, like a checkers champion at a chess match. My heartbeat shifted to a slightly higher setting. So far everything I’d said was true. Maybe I’d left out a detail or two, but that was merely omission. Now I had to lie. Luckily I had an answer prepared.

“You’re built like a brick shithouse, Mr. Oldstein,” I said.

It helped me to see his massive shoulders tense up. While I was paying attention to the threat, the lie passed more easily through my lips.

“Don’t get all bothered, brother. I just mean I asked a few shady characters I knew if they’d heard the name Eddie Brock. And when I described what you look like I was given a few choices. One of them ran the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency.”

“Who told you about me?”