He was a thin, slightly stooped, elderly Black man, seventy at least, maybe more, with a short neat gray beard and a tan beret set at an angle on his head. He wore a light khaki jacket, unzipped, over a plaid shirt in brown and gray, and a pair of loose pleated trousers in a grayish beige, and soft brown suede loafers with no socks, so that a little band of his dark ankles showed above them. He walked slowly, the way old men walk when their knees hurt, but without hesitation. He came in through the doors and stopped just inside them, on the gleaming gray tiles, and stood there for a moment, looking around the showroom.
Eli knew that look. His grandfather had it. It was not the look of someone lost or nervous or out of place. It was the look of someone taking inventory.
The old man's eyes moved slowly around the room. They went to the great round disks of light in the ceiling. They went to the long curving row of cars, the four Escalades, the sedans, the black sports car at the end. They went to the framed photographs on the wall, the Cadillacs through the decades, and stopped there for a while, on a photograph near the middle of a long black Fleetwood from the nineteen-sixties, and something passed across his face that Eli could not read. Then they went to the row of walnut desks along the wall, and to the pair of fawn-colored leather armchairs beside the first one, the one nearest the door, Derek's desk. And then they went, briefly, to Eli himself, standing by the brochure rack with a stack of brochures in his hands. And the old man nodded to him. A small, courteous, unhurried nod. The nod one man gives another across a room.
Eli nodded back. He did not know what else to do.
Then the old man walked across the floor to Derek Lawson's desk, and lowered himself carefully into the leather armchair beside it, the way an old man does, one hand on the arm, easing down, and sat back, and folded his hands on his knees, and waited.
Eli looked at the back of the showroom. Derek was still pacing by the coffee station with the phone pressed to his ear. He had not looked up.
Eli did not know what to do. In five weeks at Prestige Cadillac he had learned a great many things about how the showroom worked, almost none of which anybody had told him directly. He had learned that walk-ins belonged to whoever got to them first, unless they were sitting at somebody's desk, in which case they belonged to whoever owned the desk. He had learned that you did not approach a customer at another salesman's desk unless that salesman told you to, because that was called skating, and skating was the worst thing a salesman could do to another salesman, worse than stealing his lunch or his parking space or his girlfriend. He had learned that Derek Lawson in particular did not like to be skated, and did not like to be interrupted, and did not like Eli, very much, at all.
But the old man was sitting there. Alone. In the middle of a big bright empty showroom. And nobody had said hello to him.
Eli thought about his grandfather. He put down the brochures.
He went to the coffee station at the back of the room, keeping well clear of Derek, who glanced at him as he passed with an expression of mild irritation and turned away to keep talking into the phone. Eli poured a cup of coffee from the big silver urn into one of the good ceramic mugs with the dealership's logo on it, not one of the paper cups. He added a packet of sugar and a little cream, because he did not know how the old man took it, and that was how his grandfather took it. He took a napkin. He walked back across the floor and stopped beside the leather armchair, at a respectful distance.
"Good morning, sir," he said. "Can I get you a coffee while you wait? I took the liberty. I hope that's all right. If you take it black I can get you another one."
The old man looked up at him. He had dark, very steady eyes, Eli noticed. Calm eyes. And he smiled, slowly, a smile that went all the way up into the lines around his eyes.
"Cream and sugar is exactly how I take it," he said. His voice was low and warm and a little husky, a voice with a lot of years in it. "Thank you, young man. That's very kind."