Something Fishy Going On

by

Margaret Cracknell

A man, six or seven tables away, was staring at me. Why? Why did he keep looking at me?

I flipped the lid off my cup of tea. The string on the tea bag had fallen in. I poked at it with the stirrer; Eaton Place Food Court doesn't run to teaspoons.

I was embarrassed; he was still looking at me. Retrieving the bag I dropped it on the lid. A brown pool formed on the tabletop.

At four o'clock the food court was nearly empty. Most people were going home. There were only half a dozen tables occupied in a sea of tables.

I was on my break, with two hours still to go selling U.N.I.C.E.F. Christmas cards in the mall. Sales were not brisk. The cards were nice, but over-priced, and two weeks before Christmas is a bit late to be buying cards.

Again, he was staring at me. Every time I looked at him, he was looking at me. What was a well-dressed young man in a grey business suit, with an expensive haircut, doing in a food court anyway? A mother gathered up her two children. She piled their parkas on top of her parcels in the stroller and shepherded them out. They clumped past me in their snowpants and winter boots.

A brawny man came and sat down some distance away. He must have been a maintenance man or a cleaner. He didn't have a jacket. He was wearing heavy workboots and a dirty white T-shirt. As he reached into his jeans for a cigarette, I noticed the tattoo on his arm. He started looking at me!

This was getting really weird! I was ready to get up and leave, but then I became aware of something. Something all the more powerful and intriguing because it was totally out of character. These two men who were sitting a dozen tables apart, had made no acknowledgement of each other, and from their appearances led completely different lives, were covertly communicating with one another; brief glances, a slight movement of a hand, a studied casualness that belied their taut nerves. What was going on here?

Suddenly it came to me! This was a stake-out, a surveillance, a drug drop, a 634, or maybe even a possible 405. My T.V. vocabulary from police shows flooded my mind: streets of New York, the steaming underworld of Miami, and all that stuff.

My break was up. I had to go, but at least now I knew why they kept staring at me. They were carefully watching everyone moving up and down the mall behind me. Whether they were the good guys or the villains, I don't know, but out there was some unfinished business about to be finished.