MORNING SERIAL

“WE know each other?” he said in broken English. His accent was swamp-thick.

“We have mutual friends,” I said.

He was bobbing on his toes, this little lizard, his eyes barely open.

“Everybody know Stelly,” he said.

“Is that right?”

He banged the palm of his hand on the bar and smiled at me with an indescribably ugly smile. His face clipped back in folds and his eyes turned black. I looked at the bar and then back at him. “A drink?” I said. And he bobbed a bit more and slapped his hand again on the top of the bar. “What you drinking?”

He smiled again and just pointed at mine. I ordered him the same. He picked it up and drank it in one, tonguing at the ice when the liquid was gone, and then he held the empty glass as if it was a trophy.

“That is good,” he said, and smiled that awful smile again. “I no seen you around here before,” he said.

“I’m new,” I said.

“New in Kipros? You vacation?”

“Business,” I said, somehow adopting his broken English.

“Where you from? You Ruski?” Stelly maintained his thin grin, and spoke in a darkly mocking tone. It was surely obvious I was not a Russian. “No,” I said. “British.” He bobbed up and down, looked around the room. The music heaved and pumped.

“I am doing some work for a Russian,” I said. I’m not sure why – I think silence between us was even more unpalatable than talking to him.

“You work for Ruski?” His eyes came back to me. And with that Stelly put one of his stumpy little hands into the tight pockets of his shorts and handed me a small white pill. And then he looked me in the eye and the music seemed to quieten and my heartbeat seemed to slow.

“You have this,” he said. “And I will find you later.”

And he bobbed off, almost as if he was invisible to everyone but me.