by CD Reiss
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? You get famous not playing there and they’ll move mountains for you. Then you wait. You practice, and you wait for the show of your life.
What do you expect from her?
She was unavailable. Married. This was about closure. But my heart was in stark disagreement with my mind and fed it vulgar fantasies about separation and divorce. If she was unhappy, I’d rescue her. If she was happy, she’d—
Stop fooling yourself.
I heard her come in. A hundred circumstances had fallen into place, and she was on the other side of a thin paper screen. The hum of her longing pulsed against the skin of my guilt as I played Ballad of Blades for her and afterward… when she told me she’d thought I was dead, my skin went cold.
She hadn’t rejected me, but she would.
“Do you want to see me?” I asked.
“Yes. And not through a screen.”
She demanded my whole self at a low roar. It was too late to change my mind.
“Okay.” I placed the cello between my legs and picked up the bow. The instrument was a talisman that gave me strength to be reckless. “I need to do some things, and you need to think about it.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do.” I played a note so she couldn’t object just yet. “I’m at the Waldorf. Room 2220. Call me there tonight if you want to see me.” I stopped myself. I was creating steps between that moment and the moment she saw my face. “No. We’ll meet at the library lions at three, and you’ll have one more chance to walk away.”
Even as I said it, I didn’t want it. If she walked away, I’d be devastated.
My arm moved of its own volition, telling her the truth as the bow ground out a silly pop tune. “I Will Always Love You.”
“I won’t,” she said over the music, speaking as if she knew what that meant.
“Then you’ll be mine again. But you’ll walk when you see me, Carrie. Anyone would.”
She didn’t refute it because she hadn’t seen me yet.
And how was that fair? How could I ask her to choose when she didn’t know what was behind the screen I’d set up?
I pressed the bump on my throat. The wound that had almost killed me had never healed correctly and never would. Touching it tingled. Tucking a violin under my chin was so uncomfortable I’d had to switch to cello.
What if she touched where it hurt?
She wouldn’t, but what if she did?
Would I flinch? Push her away? Reject her the way I’d rejected the violin?
No. Never.
That was the trick of her perfect beauty. The way it was grounded in accessibility. I’d been drawn to her but not blinded.
In those early days in the hospital, lying in bed with a face made of pain, I’d feared for her life. Once I knew she was alive, I’d signed away the goddess without considering the woman.
That was my mistake, and I wouldn’t make it again.
With my heart pounding and my lower lip shaking with nerves, I called out before she got off the stage. “Wait!”
My feet did what my mind feared, coming from behind the screen, turning my body around.
She bridged the gap between us. Tilted my face up because she didn’t know she had something to fear. My memory had made her shorter than she was, but she was five eight, only two inches shorter than me. What else had I forgotten?
“Gabriel?”
Her voice. I’d forgotten its coarse humanness. Its grounding reality. Her beauty lifted the soul to heaven, but her voice fixed it to the earth.
She was and always would be mine. Even if she turned me away.
“Hi, little bird.”
I didn’t know what to expect. A high-five or a hug. A shriek or a mature conversation.
The rest was a blur. I let her see my face. I let her touch my scars.
And when she said she loved me, I believed her.
And when she called my room and told me to meet her at the lions, I ran to her.
And when, under the shadow of the stone lion named Patience, she forgave me with a kiss that reminded me of who I was under the web of scar tissue, I believed in more than her. I believed in me.
She’d kissed me.
I felt like a twelve-year-old standing in shock with his mouth open and half a boner, looking at the girl he’d given his first kiss with admiration and awe—the whole of his adulthood opening up like a door to a room of treasure. In the back of the limo, my hands shook and my tongue lay still in my mouth with the taste of her disappearing.
I’d kiss her again.
She was going to leave her husband and she wanted me.
Me.
She’d looked me right in the face and still wanted me.
All I had to do was wait for her to call. Then she was mine again.
I could barely get my head around it.
I killed time playing my cello, pacing, making arrangements with Cherie, and ignoring meals while I waited for her to call to tell me she’d left Peter or changed her mind.
At 6:01, she still hadn’t called, and there was a knock at my door.
Was it her?
Had she skipped the phone call and just come to me?
“Come in,” I called from a seat across the room. “It’s open.”
My breath stopped when the door swung open and my lungs squeezed tight, expelling every gram of oxygen when I saw who stood in the doorway.
It was Peter Thorne.
He was pressing a cloth to the side of his face. Spots of blood had soaked through. Before I could say a word, he slammed the door.
I froze.
His coat was open. White shirt half untucked, wrinkled at the chest, open three buttons.
He was there to tell me to stay away from his wife, and what could I say? I was in the wrong. I had no right to her. No business thinking about her or making arrangements to see her. I was going to have to let him in and take my lumps.
I stayed in the shadows, legs crossed as if I had a muscle in my body that was relaxed.
Peter scanned the room, eyes resting on my cello case for half a moment before falling on me again. “You. You fucker. I knew it was you.”
He took the cloth away, exposing a ragged, bleeding injury on his cheek and the bloodstained collar of the white shirt that had been hidden under his jacket.
It was then I realized he hadn’t come to warn or threaten me. He hadn’t come prepared with a list of ways I’d crossed ethical and moral boundaries.
He’d come with a list of ways he was going to cross them.
“You need a doctor,” I said as if I was bored. My anxiety was stuffed deep in my gut. He didn’t need to see that or any other sign of weakness.
“Do you know who I am?” He stepped forward, ignoring the blood.
I didn’t have or want plausible deniability. I wasn’t a coward. I wasn’t a liar, but I wasn’t a fool either. He’d know what he needed to.
“Yes.”
“I’m her husband.” He took off his jacket and slung it over the back of the couch as if he was there to stay.
“Congratulations. Is there something I can do for you?”
Peter stopped on the other side of the coffee table. “All this time.” He put the cloth back over his wound. “I knew her mind was somewhere else. And you. You were after her the entire time. Waiting behind a mask. Playing that shit for her as if I wasn’t sitting right there. Were you trying to humiliate me? Did you think I wouldn’t come after you for that? I hired the best and it took them a damn minute to find you. You’re as careless as you are ugly.”
“I never sought her out.” True enough. I hadn’t looked for her until she found me.
“Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a shit. I found you. And now I have a choice. Destroy her or destroy you. What do you think I’m going to do?”
Destroy her? How would that even be an option? At that point, it became clear how he’d been wounded and who had done the wounding. If he’d been attacked by a stran
ger, he’d be talking to the police. He wouldn’t have come straight to me with a cheek of ragged skin and open blood vessels.
She’d done it. Carrie. His wife.
Why would she do that unless he’d physically struck her first?
“That’s going to scar if you don’t get it looked at,” I said. “Trust me. I’m an expert on the subject.”
Instead of going around the coffee table, he took the straight course, marching onto it, then back onto the carpet. In two steps, he was standing over me.
“Jesus,” he said when he saw my face. He laughed, stretching his wound open until it bled fresh. It was a bite. “They really fucked you up.”
Who would get close enough to his face to bite him? Who but his wife? How much of the blood on his hands was hers? Was she alone in her sister’s apartment?
“Where is she?” I asked. “What did you do to her?”
“She’s mine to worry about.”
“She was never yours.”
I hadn’t intended to make an argument like that to the man who had married her, but it was the truth. Carrie and I belonged to each other until the day one of us died. An animal like this would never be worthy of her, ring or no ring.
“If she was yours,” he said, “you should’ve claimed her. But you didn’t. You signed her away for money.”
The truth spoken through a deceitful mouth cut into me where I’d never healed.
I’d run. I’d been so ashamed that I gave her up. The contract was an excuse. The money only covered a decision I’d already made. I gave her up because I was terrified to see her expression when she saw me. I was afraid she’d leave me, but more than that, I was afraid she’d stay out of guilt.
All the reasons were strings stretched tight over my actions. Peter knew exactly which one to pluck.
The musician was more important than the instrument, and I wouldn’t be played.
“Maybe I let her go for money. But you? You married her because she made you look like a king.”
He came at me. “I am a king, you freak.”
With the peripheral vision on my left side limited, I didn’t see the punch coming. My mind shattered into stars and blackness as he threw me to the floor and kicked me in the stomach. A wave of nausea flooded me as he pulled his foot back to nail me again.
Bending my crossed leg toward me slightly, I coiled the tension in my hip and shot it forward with all the leverage I could, kicking him just below the kneecap.
He fell backward with a scream, and I leapt on him, my knees pressing hard on his biceps. He jerked violently. He was heavier. I couldn’t hold him for long and I couldn’t let him go. He’d kill me. My body fired a reaction in hot, spinal currents that never found their way to my brain, punching his face so hard a shot of pain went to my elbow. I hit him with my left fist at an angle. I floated above pain, above my body, levitating on the release of two years of impotent rage.
My defensive posture was impossible to maintain while striking him, and he managed to flip me off. I rolled and got into a crouch. He did the same, growling at me with a bloody nose and one eye with busted vessels.
“Now I know who you are,” he said. “I came to talk to you, man to man, and you attacked me.”
“And Carrie? Did you just try to talk to her before she took half your face off?”
“You bit me.” The lie was an illustration of what he’d tell the police. “To make me ugly like you. My blood’s all over this room. Your knuckles are bleeding already.”
The room phone rang. I didn’t look at it until he did.
It could be Cherie, but it wasn’t.
It had to be Carrie, and if Peter answered it, all his suspicions would be proven true. He’d redirect his anger at her.
It rang again. The desk was right beside him. I had no chance of getting there first.
“Stay there,” he said. “I’ll get this for you.”
“Leave it.”
He moved his hand six inches to pick up the receiver, put it to his ear, and waited for her voice. “It’s you.” His attention flicked away from me in a moment of surprise. “He’s right here.”
I held out my hand. “Give me the phone.”
“Was there something you wanted to tell him?”
After crossing the room as fast as I could, I pushed the speakerphone button. “Carrie?”
“Am I on speaker?” another woman’s voice came from the desk phone.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Margie. Carrie’s sis—”
“What do you want?” Peter snapped.
“Give Gabriel the phone.”
“No. Say what you have to say.”
In her silence, Peter and I regarded each other like middle school rivals. My head ached and the nausea from getting kicked in the stomach was turning into a sick roil.
“What, Margaret?” Peter said through his teeth.
“I’d rather not say this on speakerphone.”
“What were you going to tell him that you can’t tell her husband?” he asked.
She sighed. “It’s Carrie. She’s…”
Peter’s useless grip on the receiver was so tight, his knuckles went pale pink.
“When I got home, she was having a seizure. She was on her back and… she was suffocating on her own vomit.”
“She was breathing when I left.”
“She had bruises on her neck. She had blood all over her.”
The full-color ugliness of the scene, with the sound of choking and the smell of vomit, her perfect face twisted in a fight to survive.
“What did you do?” I said.
“She was fine!” Peter shouted.
“She wasn’t.” Margie was near tears.
“What did you do?” I shouted.
“Nothing!”
“She’s dead, Peter.” Her words were delivered with cold rage. “She’s dead and you killed her.”
My heart was already still when he came for me, wielding the phone like a hard plastic spear. He drove it into my forehead hard enough to move the room sideways, spilling upside down in a thick twirl, and bringing the floor against the side of my head with a bang that made my ear ring.
I didn’t black out. Not fully. My consciousness was lifted into a gray cloud far above my body, watching Peter yank the phone cord out of the wall as if the connection was the problem. He left my broken body alone behind a closed door, as he’d done with Carrie.
I got on my hands and knees on a seesaw floor. My stomach lurched and gave up lunch.
Carrie.
I had to see her. Be there for her. Sit by her side and tell her everything would be all right. I’d never turn my back on her again.
But there was nothing I could do.
Her body was an empty shell, and the man who had pulled her out of it was running away.
Crawling to the desk, I pulled the phone to me. It rattled along the floor. The cord was frayed. Shot. Maybe that was a sign.
Leveraging my hand on the desk, I pulled myself up, intending to go down to the front desk so they could call the police. Then I’d wait for them and deliver a statement. Then I’d wait some more while Peter used his resources to hide from justice.
Carrie’s body would get colder, stiffer, losing its wholeness over time, until all the beauty inside her was digested by dirt.
The Drazens hadn’t won.
Drazen was a name for the self-interested. The greedy. It was shorthand for all the ways the powerful impacted the lives of the weak, and never for the better.
Carrie was a Drazen by name, but her heart had another name.
Peter was a Drazen, if not by name, then by the use of his influence.
As my balance steadied, I knew he would try to get away with it, and I knew he might. In the time it took for the wheels of the system to move, it would be harder and harder to bring him to justice. In those months and years, Carrie would still be dead.
Now he was vulnerable.
Now was the crack of time betwe
en his panic and his plan.
Fuck the police.
Chapter 37
NEW YORK - 1995
Peter had left his jacket behind, an oversight that would have gotten a poorer man caught, tried, and sent away for a long time. I found the stub in the breast pocket, printed on letter-sized paper and folded into fours. It wasn’t a normal airline stub, but having traveled the world anonymously for two years, I recognized a flight plan when I saw one.
SMO
TEB
N189TS
Santa Monica to Teterboro. It had come in that morning.
He had no plan out. Or maybe he did. But I was sure he hadn’t planned to murder Carrie.
It was bitter cold outside. My hat was pulled over the bump on my head where I’d been hit with a phone, but I was otherwise uncovered.
People looked, but I had no time for shame.
Herv was waiting. All I had to do was page him. Just call a number from the desk phone, type in our code for “come around front,” and—in one way or another—involve him in Carrie’s murder.
The Drazens had ruined enough lives.
“Cab,” I said to the doorman in the gold epaulettes.
“Yes, sir,” he said without making eye contact. “Where to?”
My destination would be noted in the hotel log. So no. That wouldn’t fly.
“Fifty-Second and Third.”
“Right this way.” He rushed to open the door of the first yellow cab in a long line of them. I got in as he told the cabbie the location I’d given.
The door closed and the cab moved east.
“Warm enough?” the driver asked, his hand on the climate control. His license said his name was Omar Said, and his picture matched his face. Half of it had the melted look of burn scars.
“Yeah.”
“I can turn it up.” He looked at me in the rearview, and when our eyes met, he nodded. “How’d you get yours?”
“Knife fight. You should see the other guy. He looks great.”
Omar laughed. “Me? Boring way. Grease fire. Now my wife cooks. See how skinny I am?”
He had a wife. I wondered if she was beautiful and loved him anyway. Or if loving him anyway made her beautiful.
