The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  EIGHTEEN

  Wheezing and groaning, Jimmy Self hauled his body across town, using the subway, which he hated on account of the damn stairs, to a gleaming glass-and-chrome office building with a red-granite lobby three stories high, as bustling as the flyblown lobby of his own building was dead. Except for Stinking Man, who slept on stained newspaper in the far corner nearest the stairs to the boiler room. Every morning, on his way into the office, Jimmy Self bought a Venti for himself at Starbucks and two sandwiches—ham and cheese, tuna salad, or roast beef—and a carton of orange juice at the deli next door, setting the sandwiches and juice down in front of Stinking Man, who preferred to remain nameless. “Once you’re lost,” he told Jimmy Self one time in a noxious cloud of garlic breath, “it’s best to stay lost.”

  Jimmy Self felt himself lost amid all the postmodern grandeur. This was not his world; it would never be his world. He’d never understand or feel comfortable in it. Take the elevator situation. There wasn’t one; there were two banks of eight each! He took one, but it didn’t go to the floor he needed. Faced with walking up more stairs, he took it back down to the lobby, searched for an elevator that did go high enough. Then, when he reached the right floor, the corridors were so confusing he got disoriented. Finally, he threw himself on the mercy of a denizen of this monstrous labyrinth to guide him through the hallways and turnings to the right door. The worst part was that he’d been here before, numerous times.

  Feeling defeated, he lumbered through the glass doors, was given a dubious glance by the twentysomething-year-old behind a semicircular facade. She was dressed in black, wore black nail polish, and was made up like a street waif strung out on smack. She was reading a much-scribbled-on paperback of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Perfect, Jimmy Self thought. He introduced himself as Dean Moriarty. She blinked at him, apparently not getting the joke, because she said into the mic strapped around her head, “Mr. Goodwood, there’s a Dean . . .” She looked expectantly at Jimmy Self, and when he mouthed the name, she went on, “Moriarty here to see you . . . yes, sir.” Again, she glanced up at Jimmy Self. “Are you from San Francisco, Mr. Moriarty?” When Jimmy Self, smiling wickedly, nodded, she said into her mic, “Yes, sir, he is.” She gestured. “Go right in, Mr. Moriarty. Third office on your left.”

  Sal Goodwood sat behind a desk littered with photographs. Hardly surprising, since photographs were his stock in trade. Though these days most of the photos resided on his server, Goodwood was old-school enough to enjoy best poring through the actual print photos.

  Goodwood worked for one of those skyrocketing upstarts rivaling Reuters and AP that documented the world’s news large and small through photographs.

  “Fucking cell phones’re killing us,” Goodwood said without preamble. He threw up his hands. He was a blocky man of Jimmy Self’s vintage, with a bulbous nose and an inveterate drinker’s burst capillaries decorating his cheeks like tribal scars. His office, a jumble of file cases, favorite photos, art books, and an old light box for looking at negatives, more or less reflected its occupant. “Look at this! Professional photographers who’ve done beautiful work for decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning stuff, for Chrissakes, out on their asses, replaced by snaps from the putz on the street whose favorite piece of equipment is a selfie stick. Positively disgraceful.”

  Jimmy Self, staring out at the vertigo-inducing grid-work office building across Lexington, let Goodwood blow off steam. They were drinking buddies rather than friends. The two were not synonymous, not by a long shot. Calling for a drinking buddy was like making a booty call—there was an immediate itch that required scratching. Beyond that, not much else. The exchange of favors was the commodity that made their relationship work.

  When the verbal shit storm inevitably ran its course, Jimmy Self unfolded the page 6 chronicling the alleged affair between Richard Mathis and one Angela Chase, a.k.a. Helene Messer. Maybe. He hoped. Why he was here.

  “What’s this?” Goodwood said, taking the page, smoothing it out with the professional’s practiced gesture.

  “Girl with the glamor boy. I need to see the original of that shot.”

  “Why?” Goodwood looked up, one eyebrow raised. “She giving you a hard-on or something?” His gaze returned to the photo. “She would me. I like a woman with some meat on her bones.”

  “It’s business, Goodwood.”

  “Really?” That eyebrow again. “And here I was under the impression that your business was pushing up the daisies.”

  “Resuscitated.” Jimmy Self poked a finger at the photo. “If you can’t, if you’re not up to the task—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Goodwood went to his computer keyboard. “By the way, how’s our good friend Sal Paradise?”

  “Still on the road, so I hear.”

  Goodwood chuckled. “Odds are Stephanie out front didn’t have a clue.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Really?” Goodwood shook his head mournfully. “Seems millennials have no interest in history. Too busy taking selfies and posting ’em online.” He shrugged. “Okay, got the roll. Come on around here, and take a look.” Goodwood stood back to make room for Jimmy Self. “There she is in all her glory.”

  Goodwood wasn’t kidding. As Jimmy Self zoomed in on the face, he could look beyond the short, blonde hair; the brown lenses over blue eyes. He knew he wasn’t looking at Angela Chase. Angela Chase didn’t exist. But Helene Messer did, and she was looking right back at him.

  Laurel’s reentry into the United States went unremarked, which came as a vast relief to her. She remained ahead of the curve. However, she knew she had to act fast to remain in that anonymous position.

  To that end, she took herself to Gael’s as fast as the brutal New York traffic would allow. She recalled the first time she had met Gael Luzon. The introductions had been made by Orfeo via cell phone, both as an atonement and as a going-away gift. He knew he would never see her again. She had fallen in love with Gael the moment they had met in the hushed atmosphere of a cavernous Chelsea art gallery. Surrounded by paintings of attenuated people in distress, he had looked like he’d stepped out of a color-saturated Mexican film; he had burned with a curious copper light. And strangely enough, he had known how she felt about him, had sensed it the moment they had first met. She had felt safe being near him.

  “You need to get away,” he had said.

  “Yes.”

  “Today. Now. This very minute.”

  “Yes.”

  “From whom?” And when she had hesitated: “I need to know. It will shape the how and the where of your disappearance.”

  He had a very beautiful voice. It had pierced her in a pleasurable way, and again she had felt safe.

  “Dey,” was all she had said, all she had needed to say.

  Now, her taxi sped by the immense cemeteries that yawned off the sides of the highway into the city from JFK, vivid reminders of ars longa, vita brevis, the Latin translation of an aphorism of the Greek physician Hippocrates. In plain English: time limits our accomplishments. Beyond, massive steel billboards rose, blank as the faces of the buried. The traffic built up on the approach to the Midtown Tunnel. Cops in flak jackets were everywhere, eyeing the slowly passing vehicles, sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups, occasionally pulling a truck or a van over for a spot check.

  Manhattan itself seemed much as she had left it, until her cab started to inch crosstown and she saw the unbelievable amount of new construction. Streets reduced to single lanes, cement trucks grinding away, and cranes rising everywhere. Everything had accelerated. Her four years away seemed like a lifetime. Everyone was on their cell phones, whether they were hurrying along the sidewalks, jaywalking, in intersections, sitting in restaurants, alone or with companions. Person-to-person conversations seemed so yesterday. Everyone speaking at disembodied voices from across town, across the country, on the other side of the world. The interconnectedness of life that had shrunk the world to one square block had also severed people from thos
e around them, alienated them from themselves. She felt as if she had never lived here. The machine-gun chatter of jackhammers, the toothache throb of massive diesel engines, the soaring skeletal desolation of construction site after construction site. Was this her New York? Had she landed somewhere else when she had stepped off her journey’s last segment? At a red light, a gleaming white SUV pulled up beside her taxi. The tinted windows were down, and the guy sitting in the shotgun seat, covered with tats, turned, gave her a toothy grin. Hip-hop bass and backbeat emanated from the interior, sounding like a living thing, a boxer being beaten into unconsciousness. The light changed, and she was rushing away in the Mach 1 manner of cabs. Life in an NYC that no longer seemed hers. Staring out the window at a sea of blurred faces, she took a deep breath, trying to settle herself. But she could not help asking herself where she fit in.

  From Midtown, on her way north, she could see Central Park South, now known as Billionaires’ Row, the fingerlike towers reaching skyward.

  Gael Luzon had told her he’d moved into one of these supertowers when she had called him from the transfer lounge in Istanbul.

  “What took you so long?” he said when he opened the door. He was a slim, athletic man with broad shoulders and narrow hips, fawn-colored eyes, and a nose like a Catalonian aristocrat. In his midthirties and he had not an ounce of fat on him. “Didn’t you miss me too much?”

  “You wish,” Laurel said with a snort. “Anyway, I told you everything on the phone.”

  “Hardly everything. You must tell me more.”

  Young people darted about, glued to their cell phones or their tablets, sometimes both. Everyone spoke in sibilant whispers; everyone wore black; everyone was tattooed. It was like standing in long grass surrounded by the buzz of inscrutable insects.

  “It’s complicated,” Laurel said, sidestepping a very thin young man with the manic look endemic to people who existed in this new constantly interconnected world. “Right now . . .”

  He nodded gravely. “Of course.”

  The next forty minutes were spent immersed in the blissful luxury of one of Gael’s marble-clad bathrooms. She used a TOTO toilet that did everything for her, including drying off her ass with jets of warm air; then, in a shower as large as most bathrooms, she scrubbed off the stink of canned air, sorrow, and almost constant anxiety. On the way toward human again, she pulled on the soft clothes Gael had set out for her. He kept a spare wardrobe for all his clients.

  Once she was dressed, they sat on a sweeping plum-colored sofa in a living room as vast as a country club, part of Gael’s palatial full-floor apartment overlooking Central Park from ninety-one stories up. “Thirty-five million,” he said. “That’s over seven thousand a square foot.” The view was endless, like being in an airplane.

  “Why are you living here?” she said, disoriented by the sheer dimension of opulence.

  “I like it.” He grinned disarmingly. “Also, my father designed it.” Shrugging. “It’s like the real estate people say, thin equals exclusive. One residence to a floor; it’s not an apartment. It’s an urban home. Ubersecure. Plus, I don’t have to wrangle with a bunch of geriatrics on a condo board who distrust Latinos like me.”

  Reaching over to a drinks trolley, he poured two glasses of aged mescal. “At last we’re together to celebrate.” Clinked the rim of his glass against hers: “¡Salud y plata!” Good health and money!

  Her brow furrowed. “What are we celebrating?”

  “What? Really? Dey the madman is dead.”

  Sirens sounded. She felt a tsunami of emotion engulf her.

  He pursed his lips. “My God, you didn’t know?”

  “I cut myself off from everything. I had to in order to put the past behind me.” She set down her drink. “When?”

  “Three and a half years ago.”

  Crashing against her, making her tremble so badly, Gael reaching out as if to steady her.

  “Laurel . . .”

  “I’m okay.” Even though she wasn’t, not by a long shot. Dey dead, his long arm reaching out for her gone in a puff of smoke. “What happened?”

  Gael laughed. “You happened,” he said in what seemed too casual a fashion. “After you plundered the bulk of his money, he struggled on while he hired people to find you, find his money. He had small accounts here and there, which I’m sure you knew.”

  “Too small for me to bother with.”

  “Right. Which Dey found out too late. He had enough to fund his enterprise for maybe three months, but because you anonymously informed his enemies, they began to circle like vultures. They shorted him on payments or didn’t pay at all. They know what happens when you knock out three legs of a stool. Dey tried to negotiate, but that only cemented his weakened state. Then one fine night the Russians, or maybe it was the Mexicans, blew his brains all over Jersey City.”

  “Jersey City isn’t Juárez.”

  “Not yet it isn’t. But in the future, who can say? Medellín, Cali, Mexico City, Juárez.” He grinned, showing off his perfect white teeth. “The Mexicans are already here. More to come.” Just as quickly his huge smile vanished. “It’s the innocents who get caught in the crossfire. The innocents always pay for the sinners’ transgressions; the sinners see to that.”

  Her heart fluttering, she gave him a hard look. “Gael, I really had no idea my . . .”

  “Revenge. That’s the word you’re looking for.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t imagine it would be so complete.”

  His gaze was steady, unblinking. Hard as granite. “None of us is innocent. The human condition sees to that.” He eyed her. “Just out of curiosity, what did you do with all that money?”

  “When I left here, my first stop was Geneva. I anonymously donated half of it to several foundations for helping homeless children worldwide.”

  “Christ, Laurel, you could have been the richest heiress in—”

  “It’s blood money, Gael. I’m an alchemist. Blood into gold. Now half of it’s being used to help the kids who need it the most.”

  “And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have an entirely new definition of money laundering.” He laughed, lifted his glass. “You are a woman of rare and bewildering talents.” Clinked the rim against hers. “As they say in Mexico, plata o plomo.” Money or lead, as in bullets. “But come on—after what he did, I’m betting you’d have liked to have seen Dey’s head in the street.”

  Laurel thought of Richard’s flung body in the gutter in front of his house and trembled. “I just want to get to Dearborn.”

  “Okay.” He brought out a thick packet in a manila envelope. “Everything you need.”

  She reached out a hand. “Give it here.”

  “Will you tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”

  Her fingers wriggled emphatically.

  “Of course.” Sighing, he spun the envelope across the table. “Headstrong bitch that you are.” Only Gael could say that without her taking offense.

  Even though Dey was dead, she couldn’t take the risk that the file on him was still open, that someone in law enforcement wasn’t looking for her, even after all this time. “Who am I this time?” she asked, opening the clasp.

  “Jennifer DeAngeles.” Gael hunched over as she went through the new docs he had made for her. She had dumped everything identifying her as Angela Chase, including her brown contact lenses, the moment she was through immigration and customs at JFK. She still had blonde hair though; that would have to change. “You’re a stringer for Shut Up!, an online investigative webzine.”

  She glanced up at him. “If someone checks?”

  “All squared away.” Gael frowned. “Again I must tell you I don’t understand. Why come back here when you could have gone anywhere in the world, remained Angela Chase forever?”

  “Angela Chase was outed on Crete, my photo splashed all over the internet as Richard’s other woman.”

  Gael’s bafflement increased. “You could have disappeared again, lost yourself in Istanbu
l or Hong Kong. Anywhere but here.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You came back for Richard.” His expression grew serious. “You loved him.”

  She nodded. “Not in the way you mean.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters very much to me.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t bite my head off!” He shook his head. “You’re a very clever girl. Smart, too, this I know. But what you do now seems foolish. Richard is dead. Think of your past.” He sighed deeply, genuinely, sorrowfully. “Love is tragedy: this is a truism. Why involve yourself? Leave it be.”

  “I didn’t come back for that, Gael. I came back to find Bella, his daughter. She’s missing.”

  “But why? What’s she to you?”

  She shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

  Gael pursed his lips. “Yo, Laurel, this is me you’re talking to.”

  “She and I . . . I don’t know. We share something at the very core of us. She’s as lost as—”

  “You told me. She’s been missing a few days, right?”

  “Yes, but—” Laurel shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. We’re both lost in the same way. We have no life—we don’t even understand what life is. We go from day to day, just . . . I don’t know . . . just surviving. I’ve been thinking . . . I think we need each other.”

  Gael cocked his head. “Why d’you say that?”

  “We might be the only ones who can understand each other.” When Gael said nothing, merely kept looking at her in that gimlet-eyed way of his that must unnerve so many people, she went on. She didn’t believe now she had any other choice. “Gael, please understand that she and I have nothing.”

  “Come on, Laurel. You have wealth, your independence; you can go anywhere, do anything. You have everything.”

  “Wealth? And yet I have nothing of real value.” She met his gimlet stare with her own. “But to be honest and with all due respect, I don’t know whether you can understand that.”