Quiver

by Holly Luhning

  “Dani, this is all beneath you,” says Maria. She’s perched on the window seat. “That Henry, he was never good enough for you.”

  “But I thought you liked him. You always went to his studio, Edward liked his work.”

  Maria hops off the window seat and sits beside me. “I was only friendly to him because he was your boyfriend. I wanted to get to know him so I could know more about your life. Be in your life. It has always been about you.” She wipes the last undried trail of mascara off my face. “There, beautiful as ever.”

  “But that girl said—”

  “That girl is of no importance.”

  “But you said she was nice, pretty. She’s more than pretty. And her dress was—”

  “Too obvious. She is a pretty mannequin. That is all.”

  “What I am going to do?” I’ve driven my life into a brick wall. I moved across the ocean to make risky career choices and to be with my boyfriend, who has now dumped me in the most humiliating fashion possible at a posh ball. I am so stupid. So stupid. “I’ve ruined everything.”

  “Dani. But you are being ridiculous. Stop. Henry, he did you a favour. You could never be happy with him. Better now than another year from now. You do not have to waste any more time. This is an opportunity.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever you want to happen. Quit Stowmoor, do the afterword, the consulting. Go where you please. Now,” she says, standing up and taking my hand, “you will not go back home to deal with that man tonight. Come to my place, text Henry to move his things out tomorrow. Tell him I will send Edward to move them out if he will not. You sign my contract, and resign from Stowmoor. Then you will be free.”

  The diamonds sparkle at her throat. Maybe she’s right.

  Chapter Thirty

  A ray of early afternoon light jabs the room. I hear a rattle, a clunk. A curtain sweeps back; the room floods with brightness.

  “Come, now,” says Maria, walking towards me with a tray. Her footsteps are punctuated with a clink-clink of teapot against china plate. “A little food, yes?”

  She sets the tray on the nightstand beside the bed. I peep out of the covers, eyes not yet adjusted to the afternoon sun. I see the tag of a tea bag, a bunch of purple grapes, a stack of arrowroot biscuits. I don’t move; instead, I answer her with an unintelligible moan, a half growl, half whine. My head still pounds from last night’s champagne and crying.

  Maria pulls back the feather duvet. I blink, try to bury my head into the pillow. Tea pours from pot to cup.

  “Drink,” says Maria, holding the steaming tea in one hand, drawing me into a sitting position with the other. My body follows her lead; I sit up, take the cup. She hands me an arrowroot. I gnaw the edges between sips of tea.

  “I checked your phone. Henry agreed, he is moving his things today.” Maria sets the mobile on the tray. I nod absently, too numb to be annoyed at this invasion of privacy. “It will soon be done, Dani. You will see.” She tries to finger-comb my hair, which is tangled, half matted from sleeping on my updo. I nod again and she hugs me.

  A few hours later, I’ve managed to get dressed, in an old cotton jersey empire-waist sundress of Maria’s. I’m sitting on her beige sofa with a vodka martini, extra olives. I haven’t showered, but I’ve pulled the bobby pins out of my hair and piled them like a ceremonial heap of bones on the end table. A movie about a teenage American girl who has eight months to live flickers on Sky TV. She meets a boy, they fall in love and she still dies, but it’s okay because his love was her miracle. My martini glass is dry. I go to the kitchen to see if Maria will make me another.

  “No, not yet.” She’s deep in the pantry, whispering on the phone. “It is under control. No, all is fine. For her, this heartbreak is delicate.” Pause. “She will. It will. Trust me. Let me talk to Sándor.” Maria starts speaking at full volume, in Hungarian. I jump, and the martini glass clatters against the granite countertop.

  Maria stops speaking. Instinctively, I fumble in a drawer, pretend I’m looking for something. She strides out of the pantry, hand cupped over the receiver.

  “You are all right?” Her voice is tense, an elastic ready to snap.

  “Yes, yes.” The drawer is full of take-away pamphlets, a couple of cookbooks. “I’m looking for a shot glass. I need another.” I shake the martini glass from side to side. “Something stronger.” I play it half sad, half tipsy.

  She smiles, reaches out and strokes my cheek. “I will help you. Only a moment.” She speaks a few short, clipped syllables into the receiver, then snaps the mobile shut. “Let me,” she says, unscrewing the cap of the bottle.

  Twenty minutes later I’m sitting at the table, halfway through a large glass of vodka. Maria sits beside me, arm around my shoulders. The contract is on the table. She smiles at me, serenely.

  “Let us finish with this business. Officially, let us become partners.”

  She hands me a pen. I take it, click the ballpoint in, out. I’m swaying from the drinks and Henry’s betrayal; the scene last night makes me feel like my heart’s been wolf-mauled, left for carrion. Somehow, this rip, the pain, gives me a clarity; there is no more balancing act, nothing to keep from falling apart. It has all already fallen.

  I look at Maria. Her light hair pulled back, grey cashmere sweater, diamonds still sparkling in that divot between her collarbones. She is luminous. But for the first time, she can’t court me. For the first time, I can acknowledge what I kept pressed down for so long, what I didn’t want to believe. She loves only herself. She wants me for something.

  “I can’t sign it.” I take another slurp of vodka, slam the tumbler down. I stand, take a step away from the table. Maria’s face twitches out of her smile for a moment, twitches back in. She takes a few steps towards me, caresses my cheek.

  “Dani, darling. You are upset. But this, we discussed. It is for you, for the best.”

  “No.” I don’t move, just stare at her.

  “Dani, darling.” She moves closer, faint smell of gardenias. She presses her silky cheek to mine, circles out, kisses me on the bridge of my nose. “You are so beautiful,” she whispers into my ear. “Come.” She takes my hand, tries to lead me back to the chair. “Trust me.”

  I shake her hand free of mine.

  Her phone rings. She answers, her voice elastic-band tight again, speaks in clipped monosyllables: yes, no, I will soon, I will look. She checks her email while still barking into the phone. A minute later, she comes back to me.

  “Dani, you must not be feeling well.”

  “Actually, I feel fine.”

  “That was Edward. I must go out. See yourself to bed. You will sign this later, when you’ve slept. And, you do have work tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. Her visit with Foster.

  “Later. Of course, Maria.” I sit down.

  Ten seconds after the door clicks shut, I’m searching. First I go through the reams of paper she’s left on the table. Nothing but the contract and the diaries she’s already shown me. I move to her desk, rifle through the side drawer. Blank letterhead from the Museum of London. A stack of her business cards, heavy stock, cream-coloured: Maria János, Archivist, her email, her mobile. I move to the centre drawer: bills, electric, phone. I sit down on the iron lattice-back chair, straighten the papers into a neat pile.

  Then it drops from the sheaf of white bills. A deep red business card. In black, cursive font, it reads The Beauty of Báthory. The next line, a website: bathorybeauty.net. I flip the card over. Handwritten in black ink, an address on Old Street. And a word, looks Hungarian: gyilkosság.

  It has to be a research group, I think. Please let it be a research group, a study group. I move over to the keyboard, type in the website.

  A dark red screen appears, with the word Beauty in black gothic font. I click on the word. A login window pops up. ID and password.

  I rifle through Maria’s papers again. It could be anything. I run through the obvious: Báthory, Elizabeth, Hungary, Countess. Maria. Wha
t for a password: blood, beauty? The word on the card?

  I try a trick I learned when I first started at Stowmoor and couldn’t keep straight all the IDs and passwords I needed. I switch on the autofill option on the computer. Then open up browser history. Go back to the last time Maria logged in, which looks like this afternoon. Then I try the ID box again.

  I go through about thirty words, from Budapest to variations on Maria’s name. Foster’s comments about “the network” keep wiggling their way into my mind. I don’t want to think this is connected. But if it is, if it is. I mustn’t panic. I am a trained psychologist, I tell myself, so think. What would Maria pick? She wouldn’t use something directly about herself. But she’d keep everything related.

  I type in t-h-r...and the autofill punches out the rest: throne1.

  The curser blinks, black, black, black. I type s-t-o-w...

  The word stowmoor appears in the password box.

  The login page dissolves and for a moment the screen is black. A picture of Báthory materializes in the middle and floats to the top right-hand corner. Then a graphic of the letter B surrounded with vines appears and floats to the top left-hand corner. A menu bar slides down. In red, cursive font, it lists only four options: events, news, classifieds, links. Then a white box pops up in the centre. A window to a chat room.

  The window is blank, and I stay away from it. I turn to the menu, click on Events. A calendar for this week opens up. Sunday, a cryptic listing: A, LDN, 9p.m.

  A. What place in London begins with A?

  I scan the table, try to think of any word, any place Maria ever mentioned that started with A. I pick up the red business card, anxiously tap it against the edge of the keyboard, think, think. The address. I flip the card over, type the Old Street address into Google.

  Aquarium. The place she’d mentioned, where she met a client before having drinks with Henry. I look at my watch. It’s five to nine.

  There is a ting. Some text has appeared in the window, from username csok23: M, you almost here? Hope this is you on your blackberry, not from home.

  I grab the mouse, search for a logout button, find one under the Báthory picture. The website clicks, goes black, then returns to the home page. I go back into the browser history and clear everything.

  I gulp back the rest of my drink, go into the kitchen and put my hand on the blue cap of the vodka bottle, think of pouring another. Everything swims. Budapest, the tableau vivant. Dogs barking, a ruined castle strewn with poppies. Maria, plucking me out of receptions. Foster. Maria with her blonde-blonde hair on Henry’s throne.

  I take the red card and walk out the door.

  I come out the wrong exit of the Old Street tube station and have to cross the street above ground, damp asphalt and air thick with exhaust. A hundred yards ahead, I see a massive brick building painted aqua. It’s half a block long. I stop at the first entrance, a silver garage door, pulled closed and locked. A piece of paper, framed in glass, hangs on the turquoise brick. It’s a list of days of the week and Aquarium’s opening hours. Sunday: 10 p.m.—4 a.m. Music prescription: Dirty, minimal electronica. My watch reads nine twenty-five.

  I continue down the length of the building. It runs until the end of the block, three more silver garage doors bolted shut. Finally, some windows, with Aquarium Pub stencilled across the top in white, frosted letters. I lean into the window, cup my hands around my eyes to block out the glare of the street lights. Black, nothing. Charcoal soundproofing foam and the backs of speakers line the windows. I put an ear to the glass; no sound, no rattle of booming bass.

  I must have misunderstood the message or got the place wrong. The yellow-orange street lamps shed enough light for me to see my reflection in the dead-end windows. I’d tossed on my coat and shoes from the night before and hadn’t washed my face or touched a comb or a toothbrush the whole day. My hair is a hairspray-tangled mess of frizzed-out curls. The hem of my blue and gold brocade coat doesn’t match up in the front; I’ve fastened the buttons wrong. Immediately, I undo the belt at my waist and rebutton.

  Again, I step closer to the glass. My face looks sallow, sagged out. I wonder if the reflection is accurate, or if it’s distorted by the poor light. I notice a clump of black makeup under my right eye. I scrape it off with my fingernail; it’s flakey and sticky, a remnant of my false eyelash glue. The skin under my eyes looks shadowy and crinkled. When I took off from Maria’s, I grabbed my green rhinestone purse from last night. I dig around inside and find a compact and some concealer. I just finish covering up the bags under my eyes and have started to put on a bit of pink lip gloss when I see a flash of black reflected in the compact. Footsteps clicking down the footpath. A man’s face in the mirror. Just a quick smear as he turns down the side street behind me, but I feel a jolt of recognition. I’m sure I know him.

  I shove gloss and compact into my purse and clip-clop to the edge of the Aquarium building, trying to be light on the pavement in my lavender heels. I watch as the man knocks on another garage-style door, around the side. The door rolls up. A muscled arm attached to a large sculpted shoulder leans on the door’s interior handle, ushers the man inside.

  I run towards the entrance. The silver door is rolling down, is halfway to the ground. I bang on the metal.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Wait a minute.” The door starts to slide up. My heart flutters like a hummingbird and I have no idea what I’m going to say to whoever is on the other side. Excuse me, I’m looking for a beautiful blonde woman, probably insane, who is obsessed with a Hungarian countess and ritual killings? Happen to know if she’s meeting with some friends here tonight?

  The door rises to reveal the man I saw in the street, tall, a gloved hand holding the bottom edge of the door. He stares at me.

  “Milo?” I say, half to myself.

  For a moment he looks confused. Looks at my shoes, my hair. Stares at my face a few seconds. Then his brows relax. “Oh, yes. You are Danica, right? Maria introduced us, in Toronto.”

  “Right.” I say this in an of course tone, pray he believes I should be here.

  “I didn’t know you had officially joined us.” He leans towards me, a kiss on each cheek.

  I hope the peppermint scent of my lip gloss masks the smell of my unbrushed teeth. Even with the concealer and gloss, I must still look a wreck. “Oh, yes. Just running a bit late. Had to stop off for some cough drops. Fighting a cold, you know.” I smile, look him straight in the eyes.

  “Well, it’s worth coming out for. A big night. My work is on display.” He stands squarely in the door, doesn’t make a motion to invite me in.

  “So Maria has been promising me. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” I tuck a frizzy tendril behind my ears, put the other hand on my hip. My heart thrums. I shift my weight to my heels, try to stop my calves from shaking. Keep my eyes on his. Maintain eye contact with the subject. Smile, but not too much.

  Milo steps to the side, puts his hand on the small of my back. “Well, we’re late. Better get in there.”

  I step inside. A large, muscled man in a black T-shirt, the owner of the arm I saw earlier, sits on a stool by the door. He’s wearing earbuds and is flipping through an iPod, but he stands up when he sees me. Milo gives him a nod and he sits back down.

  We walk down a dark, narrow hallway. I smell chlorine. My heels click loudly on the concrete floor as I try to keep up with Milo. The hallway turns left, right, has only the occasional light to keep me from veering into the wall.

  The hallway brings us to a large room. Silver stools line a deep red bar with a backlit array of liquor bottles: blues, reds, greens. Down a few steps, in the middle of the room, white chaise longues are clustered around a deep blue rectangular pool. Lights shine from the bottom of the pool; the pearly chaises are dappled with a sapphire glow that emanates from the water. I slow down, look for Maria. The place is empty except for a waiter wiping the long red bar.

  “Pretty room, but we’re down this way.” Milo puts his arm around my shoulder
and turns me towards a door to our left. “Wait a sec, Dani.” He stops me, looks at my face. Reaches out and cups my chin.

  “You’ve got a bit of...” He wipes his thumb across the edge of my lip, pulls his hand away.

  Gloss, smeared outside my lip line. His thumb is shiny pink. I’m waiting for him to realize I’m a mess, I’m a fake. He just smiles.

  “You girls have a lot to keep straight,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulders and leading me through the next door. I follow him down another narrow, concrete-floored hallway. There’s a second bouncer guarding a heavy metal door.

  “Good evening,” he says, getting up from a little stool and standing directly in front of the door. He’s about six foot four.

  “Evening,” says Milo. Then a little more formally, “We’re here for Báthory.”

  “Password?”

  Milo looks at me, gives me a half smile and a nod. “Go on, first time.”

  My heart no longer thrums, it thuds, a racehorse pounding down a short-haul track. “Oh,” I say, “I’m probably pronouncing this wrong, but...” I claw through my mind for every Hungarian pronunciation rule I learned back in Budapest, hope that indeed, the word is Hungarian. Or the password at all. “Gyilkosság?”

  The tall man smiles and cracks open the door.

  There are candles everywhere. Soft light on thick moss carpet. My heel catches on a loop as I walk into the room. I grab Milo’s arm to keep from falling. A crowd is gathered, hushed, their backs to us. Everyone is staring at a large projector screen at the far end of the room.

  A naked white thigh, two sets of bite marks. A piece of skin ripped out, blood streaked down the calf. The screen flips to another image: an asphalt path, yellow dividing line interrupted by a pool of dark liquid. Next photo: a girl, crumpled and supine on a tiled floor, bloody leg poking out of a navy school uniform skirt. Dark, matted hair covers her face. Her shirt collar is stained red, her head and shoulders cushioned in a puddle of blood. Her palms are branded with the letter B. The crowd murmurs approvingly.