He would've looked away. He was already looking away.
Then the fruit cart at the corner lost its wheel.
It went down in slow motion, the way these things always do, and the old woman behind it went down with it, and forty pounds of oranges rolled out into the crosswalk just as the light turned green. Horns started immediately. The old woman knelt in the road among her scattered inventory, reaching after it with both hands, and along the whole crowded sidewalk, forty people saw it happen and thirty-nine of them reached for their phones.
The girl had already run past. She was late; she'd made that clear at speed. Whatever she was late for was hers, and the old woman wasn't, and Valerio had seen enough people to know exactly how this usually ended.
The girl skidded to a stop, turned around, and came back.
She came back, dropped her backpack on the curb like it held nothing important, and knelt down in a live intersection to gather oranges, and she did it laughing, saying something to the old woman that made the old woman stop shaking and startdirecting, and she waved a cheerful apology at the honking cars with one hand while loading fruit with the other, as though a crosswalk full of furious traffic was a kitchen she was tidying and everyone would simply have to be patient.
Interest, Valerio noted. It had been years.
The light cycled and the honking climbed. Most of the cars ground forward around the two of them in irritated arcs, and the girl thanked each one as it passed, which was possibly the most alarming thing Valerio had seen all month, and then a silver coupe swung out from behind the stopped taxi and accelerated into the gap where the two of them knelt.
He was out of the car before the decision finished forming.
Later, his security man would have several things to say about that, in the strangled diplomatic language of a man whose job had just been performed for him, badly, by the person he was paid to protect. Valerio would not remember most of it. What he'd remember was two lanes of afternoon traffic and how long they were, and the coupe not slowing, and his own hand closing on the girl's arm and hauling her and the old woman both back against the stalled taxi as the silver car tore through the space they'd occupied, horn wailing away down the block like the whole thing had been done to it.
Valerio memorized the plate. On principle.
"Okay," the girl said, to the world in general. She was pressed against the taxi with an orange in each hand and her heart visibly going like a rabbit's, and what she said next, breathlessly, sincerely, was: "Okay, wow. Ma'am, are you alright?"
Not am I alright. Valerio looked at her a beat too long, and let himself notice it.
The old woman was alright. The old woman was, in fact, already patting the girl's cheek and calling her something tender in another language, and the girl was pressing rescued oranges back into her hands and refusing, with genuine horror, the coins the woman tried to give her, and between the two of them they restored the cart to three functioning wheels and a length of twine before the girl finally turned around and looked up at him.
Up, and then further up.
"You," she declared, "just saved my life."
"Yes," Valerio agreed.
"That car would've turned me into modern art."
"Both of you."
"I want to say thank you, except thank you feels a little..." She gestured with an orange, searching for scale. "Small? Thank you is what you say when someone holds the elevator. Is there something above thank you? There should be a whole tier system."
"Thank you covers it."
"It really doesn't, but okay. Thank you. I mean it." Then her gaze snagged on his lapel, and her whole face fell. "Oh no. Oh no, I've ruined your suit."
An orange had, in fact, perished against his chest at some point in the proceedings. The suit was worth roughly the fruit cart's annual revenue, and its jacket now wore the evidence of its first honest day's work.
"I'll pay for the dry cleaning," she said immediately, already digging into her backpack. "I have..." A pause, while she did visible math and the math did visible damage. "I have four dollars and a bus pass, but I get paid Friday, so if you give me an address I can—"
"The suit survives."
"Are you sure? Because that looks like the kind of fabric with feelings." She surrendered the search, and instead held out one of the two oranges she was still holding. "Here. Down payment. It's bruised, but so was I almost, so it's thematic."
He looked at the orange.
He could not remember the last time a stranger had offered him something and wanted nothing back except to be even. In his world, no one paid debts with fruit, and no one, no one, thanked the traffic.
And then it happened. The girl's eyes traveled over him again, the black suit, the black tie, the general effect that made hard men remember appointments elsewhere, and she put it together with the sandwich board and the sidewalk full of tuxedos, and understanding swept across her face like a curtain going up on a show she'd personally arranged.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh, you're here for it, aren't you? The auditions. The Bond thing, the stunt doubles. Because that back there, that whole..." She waved the orange at the intersection, at the taxi, at the space in the air where he'd apparently rewritten physics. "...that was extremely stunt double of you. That was the most stunt double thing I've ever seen a person do."
