Next to me, Malcolm stood up as the hobo launched into the "never gonna see you" part.
Malcolm flung his arms wide and took a deep breath. "Never gonna see you any more," he sang in harmony, a deep bass voice booming from his chest as he leaned into the man, clearly indicating that he should lead. The man's eyes lit up and together they finished out the first verse in perfect harmony to a smattering of applause. Then Malcolm reached into his inside pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed the man a wad of bills. Then he sat down again.
I stared at Malcolm. I wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd ripped off his skin and revealed himself to be a robot underneath. In fact, I would have been significantly less surprised by his behavior than I had been up to this point.
"I didn't know you could sing," I said stupidly.
He held a hand up and tilted it back and forth, indicating that of his panoply of talents, singing merely fell into the fair to middling range. I watched the hobo counting his haul, his eyes wide as saucers. "How much money did you give him?" I asked in a low voice.#p#分页标题#e#
"A little over a thousand," he replied.
I backed away and stared at him. "Are you serious?" I said at last.
"Why shouldn't I?" he said. "What good is it doing me?"
I had no idea. Probably buying me lunch, but that was selfish. "And the singing?"
He shrugged, a little one-shouldered affair, self-deprecating. "Allah will not show mercy to the unmerciful," he told me.
Of all the things I had expected him to say, that certainly wasn't it, but when I opened my mouth and tried to comment on it, we arrived at our destination. The train screeched to a stop and he stood up again, holding his hand out. "Let's go eat," he said.
Without thinking, I put my hand in his and I felt the zing of attraction spark between us. Then he was pulling me to my feet and we were out among the press of people, jostling through the corrals of the underground until we reached the surface, all together, and streamed out into the city.
"So are you Muslim?" I asked him finally as the waiter wandered off to the kitchen with our order. The Indian restaurant he'd taken me to was a little out-of-the-way place that I'd never heard of before, and the proprietor seemed to know Malcolm, though he only said, "Welcome back," before ushering us to our table—the best in the house, though that was a dubious honor.
We sat together in the booth, as though we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Where our knees had touched on the subway train, here Malcolm pressed his entire thigh against mine, and I had to remind myself not to swoon. The food also smelled amazing, and Malcolm insisted on ordering for us. I let him. His thigh may or may not have had something to do with the allowance of that liberty. And, well, I know what I like and what I don't, and he hadn't ordered anything that would send up alarm bells for me. Such as too many chickpeas. I like chickpeas, but one of my friends used to live on chickpeas, and they made him gassier than a heifer.
Malcolm looked at me with surprise. "Am I Muslim?" he said. "Why would you ask that?"
I tried to suppress the eye roll that welled up within me, but like a force of nature, it could not be denied. I rolled my eyes. "Because you just spouted some line at me about Allah's mercy."
"Oh, that," he said, as if people quoted the surahs or the hadiths or whatever that had been all the time in casual conversation. "I just think of that line whenever I see someone who needs help."
"Really?" I said. "Why that particular phrase?"
He appeared to think about this for a moment, and then shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "I think it resonated with me during the time of my life that I heard it."
"What time was that, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I don't mind your asking," he said. Then he hesitated. "But I think I might mind telling. Please excuse me. That was was an excellent question and I had to shoot it down like that."
I held up my hands. "Don't feel bad on my account," I said. "I'm just trying to get to know you better. Things you say and things you don't say are all part of that."
He smiled. "That's a very interesting way of looking at it. Very eastern, or possibly Kabalistic."
I had to admit to myself, Malcolm Ward got weirder and more interesting the more he talked, which was the opposite of most of the people I had run into. Usually the mysterious people you meet are only mysterious up until the moment they admit to growing a shroom farm in their closet or confess they are bipolar or something else that explains their behavior. So far Malcolm had listed off Shinto and Muslim thought to me. And also reincarnation. "You know a lot about religions," I said. "Did you study them in school or something?"