From behind the bar, Luisa and I watched the man in the cream suit and sunglasses sitting at a table on the cafe’s streetside patio. Though alone, he had ordered a French press with two mugs. He sipped from his; the other sat empty across from him. After sitting for about fifteen minutes, he checked his watch, then took a pen from his inside jacket pocket. Reaching across the table, he clicked the pen once over the empty cup, then returned the pen to his pocket.
“Did you see that?” Luisa said.
“What’d he just do?” I said at the same time. “Was that … poison?”
“In a pen, Carlo? This isn’t a movie. No one actually does that.”
“Well he wasn’t writing on the mug.”
“Obviously.”
“What he did was completely unnecessary!”
“Maybe he was just looking at it. It was a gift, and it’s still new, you know, like the day after Christmas.”
I took a step away from her, then reached as far as I could toward her. “Yep, this is comfortable. This is where I would naturally hold something I wanted to look at.”
“Maybe he forgot his glasses.”
I shrugged and turned back to the patio.
“I wonder who he’s meeting,” she said.
Outside, the Italian summer was heating up, the late afternoon sunlight beginning to slant down over the umbrella, which kept the suited man in shadow. He was watching the street, which was quiet, the city’s siesta still waiting for the evening to cool.
The man in the cream suit was filling his cup a second time when a new patron arrived – short and balding, his shirt’s underarms, collar, and a column down his spine darkened with sweat. He walked in past the hosting station and bar without a glance at us, and I had a moment’s thought to address him, ask his business, come to a warning if it felt needed. But I said nothing, and he proceeded to the patio where he sat down across from the man in the cream suit. The coffee press still in hand, he glanced across at his guest and directly filled the other cup.
They spoke quietly for a few minutes, sipping their coffee, while Luisa and I watched them. “Go check on them,” she whispered to me.
“What? No,” I said.
“See if they want anything else.”
“Like a trash bag and cleaver? You go.”
She didn’t move.
Finally, we noticed the man in the cream suit counting out a few Euros and leaving them on the table. He put his hat on and stood to leave. His sweaty little guest remained in his seat, quite still. The suited man nodded to us as he passed, the brim of his hat low, and disappeared around the street corner.
We looked back at the second man, who hadn’t moved. “Are you going to check on him?” Luisa said.
I shook my head. “How long should we wait until we call the police?”
Matthew Brennan is a writer and freelance editor based in the Pacific Northwest. Having earned his MFA in fiction from Arizona State University, he remains on the editorial staff of the Hayden’s Ferry Review. Brennan received several awards and fellowships for his fiction, which has most recently appeared in Ginger Piglet, The Molotov Cocktail, Fiddleblack, and Pure Slush, and is forthcoming from Trigger and The Eunoia Review.
