Detective Fog and the Mission Pigeon

Chapter 19. Mobsters in the Morning

November 2, 2015, 11:40 a.m.

Thalia Zane snapped an old flip phone shut, and mid-stride tossed it into a garbage can she walked past on Columbus in North Beach. The ludicrous four-lane street was like a commuter highway with bumper to bumper cars, except that they had to stop at crosswalks and red lights to let the crazy parades of pedestrians go by. It was the busiest street in the city and all without a building over two stories high.

Tourists would have thought the stream of people and cars were heading to a special event, maybe at Fisherman's wharf, but it was a regular Saturday just like any other. The park at Washington Square, even with the early afternoon fog coming in, looked like Woodstock had sprung up in the middle of it, or more like Woodstock had just been there, but the stage had disappeared, leaving a hundred hippies dancing and swirling hula hoops and smoking joints and eating authentic Mexican burritos and authentic Italian pizza to the music that wasn't playing.

The morning had involved hungry work that made Thalia run on her stilettos, past all the mayhem and dart through the slow-moving crowd on her way to pizza at Anchor Bay Cafe on the corner of Columbus and Lombard. Once or twice, she even used her elbows to butt ahead of groups that moved like molasses.

It was one of those corners where the diagonal Columbus crossed a grid-like street forming an acute angle, and therefore, the pizza shop opened out of a triangle not unlike a flatiron building but with the more severe panes of glass meeting at a sharp point, almost making fun of the ridiculous planes of the intersection. The entrance was on Lombard.

Inside the pizza shop were red-checkered tablecloths and the smell of a wood fire oven. The joint was packed every Saturday, a bizarre meeting place since it was uncomfortably full to the brim. Edging between tourists there for an authentic Neapolitan slice was uncomfortable, and there was always a line to get food, a line to get to the bathroom, the water pitchers were always empty, and the pizza sold out by two p.m.

Upstairs her father had a spacious conference area and lush offices, but the office was closed up on weekends, so meeting in the cafe was a matter of habit, not anything based on logical sense. The kids had a big table in the back, though, and there was one seat left, saved for Thalia. Some of the other kids had to stand around; they had been told not to take Thalia's chair.

Franz Ferdinand played her in, and she sashayed to her seat along to the beat.

🎵I say don't you know

You say you don't know

I say, take me out!

🎵If I move this could die

Eyes move this can die

I want you to take me out🎵

Heads swiveled around to her red-lipsticked, but otherwise un-madeup face, and the boys and girls looked up from their pizza and welcomed Thalia when she sat down. Joey Podesta, a girl with a blue perm erupting out of her cream-colored cloche who liked eyeliner a lot more than Thalia but kept her lips pink as peaches, slid to the very precarious edge of the bench along the wall to speak to Thalia.

🎵I know I won't be leaving here (with you)

I know I won't be leaving here

I know I won't be leaving here (with you)

I know I won't be leaving here

🎵With you

🎵I say don't you know

You say you don't know

I say, take me out!🎵

Luckily it was so noisy she didn't have to get out of her seat to avoid being overheard.