Riding the Rap

At two he tried Bobby Deo again. No answer.

He phoned Joyce. Her message voice came on. He waited and then said to her machine, “I’ve been here over an hour, corner of Atlantic and A1A-or Ocean Boulevard, Ocean Drive, I don’t know, they’re all the same thing-Delray Beach, right? You were there when he phoned, isn’t that what I told you? Said he’d have sixteen five for me. Well, he isn’t here.” Harry was aware he sounded as if he was blaming Joyce. The thing that irritated him, she wasn’t home. But then realized that if she was, she’d ask him how he got to Delray Beach. He’d tell her and she’d jump on him for driving without a license, suspended on account of the DUI, and he’d have to listen to her nag him about it. So it was just as well she wasn’t home and he had to talk to the machine. Jesus. He said, “There’s a girl here with tarot cards going around to the tables. Maybe I should have her tell my fortune. The way things’re going… I don’t know, I’ll call you later.” He returned to his table to find the little girl with the tarot cards waiting for him.

She said, “If you don’t mind my making an observation, I see a lot of confusion and struggle going on inside you.”

A nice-looking girl, dark hair down past her bare shoulders, wearing one of those tube tops, a white one. Harry pulled a chair out for her. As they were both sitting down he said, “Honey, when a guy says he’s go

The little girl waited, hands folded on top of her tarot cards. Harry was looking for the waiter as she said, “I saw the confusion in you when you first came in and sat down.”

“Nervous anticipation,” Harry said. “Let’s have a drink.”

“What I perceived,” the girl said, waiting then for Harry to look at her, “was not anticipation, but deep feelings about a choice you have to make. Something to do with unfinished business.”

Harry looked off again saying, “Is that right?” caught the waiter’s eye and raised his hand.

“You’re trying to decide whether or not in the next few weeks you should leave here.”

Harry turned in his seat to face her.

“If you ought to quit your business and go someplace else to live.”

He was staring at her now, this kid calmly looking back at him, her hands folded. He said, “How do you know that?”

“I see you sitting at a sidewalk café. Not like this one or this kind of view.” She gestured to take in the terrace, the street, cars parked at meters, the beach and the Atlantic Ocean out there. “I see an older, more tropical setting. I want to say like on the Mediterranean, the Riviera.”

Harry kept staring at her. “That’s amazing.”

“Am I right?”

Close enough. The Italian Riviera, I have a villa over there near Rapallo, up in the hills above the town.”

The girl said, “But you don’t know if you should go back.”

Harry laid his arms on the edge of the table and hunched over to get closer to her. “Maybe you can tell me what I should do.”

“Well, if you’d like a reading…”

“With the cards?”

“It’s up to you. I’ll be honest, though, I don’t think the cards have any power in themselves. It’s because you touch them-when I ask you to shuffle the cards? Then I get a read off your vibrations. Another way is if I hold something of yours that you own, something personal. Or I touch your hands.”

Harry straightened and pushed his hands toward the center of the table. He saw her smile, her hands moving toward his now, and felt her fingertips.

“How do you know how to do this?”

“I have psychic powers.”

“I mean is it something you learned?”

“You can get better at it,” the girl said, “but you have to be born with some degree of paranormal abilities. When I was just a little girl I’d get pretty intense psychic impressions. It was fu

Harry kept quiet; he watched her close her eyes again. She had nice eyelashes, dark and long, a nice soft mouth.

“The reason you think you ought to go back involves some kind of unfinished business. You own property over there?”

“I leased a villa.”

“What about investments?”

“Over there? I don’t have any.”

“There’re funds involved…”

Harry waited.

She paused again, then opened her eyes. “Maybe we should start with why you wanted to live in Italy. The unfinished business doesn’t have to have anything to do with, you know, business. I’m pretty sure, though, it relates to something that happened in the past.”

Harry said, “Well, I was there during the war… You know, you might be right. And I kept going back, thinking about living there someday. But then when I did make the move it was, well, different than I thought it would be.”

“How was it different?”

“For one thing it was winter, a lot colder’n I ever imagined. There were other things, too. The villa’s drafty, hard to heat… The language can be a problem, trying to order in a restaurant…”

The girl said, “So even though there’re good reasons why you don’t want to go back, you still feel the urge.”

“If that makes sense,” Harry said.

“Well, I think this urge,” the girl said, “is caused by the unfinished business you’re not aware of. And the unfinished business, whatever it is, has to do with something that happened in the past.”

Harry thought about it. He shook his head saying, “I don’t know what it could be. Outside of I signed a lease for the villa, paid in advance…”

“When I say ‘in the past,’” the girl said in her quiet tone, looking directly at him, “I don’t mean that time during the war, or on one of the trips you took since then. I’m talking about a soul co

Harry said, “Wait,” straightening up a little more, “are we getting into reincarnation here?”

He felt the tips of her fingers move on his hands, touching his knuckles.

She said, “It’s the feeling I get. You don’t have to, you know, believe in it yourself.”

Harry said, “No, go on,” and had to smile. “You see me living in some other time, like maybe hundreds of years ago?”

“It’s not something I actually see. You’re going to have to tell me about it.”

“But I might’ve been a real Italian at one time? Or going way back, like maybe even a Roman?”

She gave him a nice smile with a shrug. “Would you like to find out?”

“If it’s true,” Harry said, “then I might even’ve been somebody, huh? I mean like a well-known figure.”

“It’s possible.” She said, “All we have to do is regress you, take you back to some time in the past and you can tell me about it, who you were, what it was like…”

“How do you do that?”

“I use hypnosis, take you back gradually and you tell me where you are, what’s going on. Have you ever been put under hypnosis before?”

“Not that I can remember.”

She said, “I can’t promise results, but I think you’d be a good subject. Would you like to try it?”

“I’d love to,” Harry said. “But you don’t do it here, do you?”

“No, you’d have to come to my house. I’m just up the road.” She waited.

And Harry said, “Right now?”

“It’s okay with me.”

He watched her get up from the table, this slender girl in her tube top, not much up there, and tight jeans hugging her hips and thighs. She sure didn’t look like a fortune-teller. Now she got a wallet out of her hip pocket, fingered through it and brought out a business card she handed him.