The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  The doorbell chimed. I leaned the wood against the table, knocked my boots against the table leg so I wouldn’t trample sawdust through the house, and went to answer it. It was Julia, lips like sunset, hair like evening shadow.

  “Will you let me in?”

  I stood aside and gestured her in.

  “This place is so quiet.” She looked around, down at the silk Persian rug, then up. “My god. This is beautiful.”

  I had removed the ceiling last year and replaced the inadequate two-by-four rafters with antique oak four-by-sixes I had rescued from an old Ponce de Leon mansion and carved myself. A fan turned lazily overhead. “Thank you. Can I get you something? Iced tea? Beer?”

  I got us both a beer. She was still standing in the dining room, craning upwards.

  I handed her the beer. “The height makes it very practical in hot weather.”

  She nodded absently, then recalled her manners. “I’m sorry. It’s just…” She took a sip of the beer, then looked at the bottle. “What is this?”

  “Lindeboom. It’s a Dutch lager. Would you like to sit?”

  She surprised me by ignoring the couches and folding herself down onto the rug, the way I would if I were alone. “Was she really your client?”

  “Her name is Beatriz. The Spanish consulate hired me to protect her while she was in Atlanta for a four-day visit. She needed a babysitter more than a bodyguard, but she was useful as cover. I went to Honeycutt’s party as her utterly anonymous escort.”

  “You’re six feet tall and were wearing a dress no bigger than a napkin. How were you anonymous?”

  “By acting exactly the way each individual I encountered expected me to act, and by lying.”

  She looked at me curiously, at my boots and cut-offs stained with glue and varnish. “Don’t you ever get…lost, pretending to be so many people?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just like being an actor.”

  “No. No, it’s not. Actors follow other people’s scripts. You follow your own.”

  Verbal chi sao. “Call it improvisation, then.”

  A beat of silence. “Do you know many actors?”

  “None. Some performers.”

  “Like Cutter?”

  “There’s no one like Cutter.”

  She grinned. “You said that before.” Then she stretched and seemed to relax. “And your…Beatriz has gone back to wherever she came from?”

  “For a month or so. She met a harmless law intern called Peter at the party and is probably somewhere over the Atlantic even as we speak, dreaming of having his babies. So what was it you were so hot to tell me Saturday night that you drove out here at midnight?”

  “The Friedrich provenance is impeccable. There’s a fifteen-year gap not long after it was created, but I talked to a man who is considered to be the foremost Friedrich scholar—you wouldn’t believe my long-distance phone bills—who examined the painting thirty years ago and would stake his reputation on its genuineness. Apart from that, the provenance was perfect. And I found out from a dealer that there was a rumour last year that Honeycutt was trafficking in fake art. Something to do with an Anglo-Saxon armring. After a lot of discreet calls, I’ve discovered there are now two armrings in private collections—one in Argentina, one in Italy—that look exactly the same. I got the owners to fax me pictures late Saturday. So it was Honeycutt, the bastard.”

  She took a long, fierce swallow of her beer. Her throat moved once, twice, three times.

  “When I thought about those phone calls I made, assuring him there was nothing to worry about, not really, that we were having just a little teeny problem, I got furious. He knew all the time. The asshole knew all the time! But what I want to know is, how does he expect to get away with it? Does he think we’re all fools, that we’ll lie down and take it?”

  Her beer was gone. I held out my hand for the empty. She followed me into the kitchen and looked around at the cherry cabinetry, the white counters, pine floor.

  “This is nice, too.”

  I popped the top off another Lindeboom and handed it to her, reached into the fridge for mine.

  “So, anyway, I called him. I told him—”

  I paused, hand still in the fridge. “When did you call him?”

  “This morning. I told his machine—”

  “What time this morning?”

  “What does it matter? I said…You look very odd.”

  My hand was getting cold inside the fridge. I took it out, closed the door. “Tell me exactly what time you called.”

  “Before breakfast. About eight.”

  …left very early this morning for a six-day trip…What did that mean? Five? “Tell me what you said in your message. Exactly.”

  “Oh, I was careful. I told him that I didn’t want his business anymore, and that I was sure he knew why, that I hoped he would avoid unpleasantness and never try to contact me again or use my name in a business context. I’m sure he got the message.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I told you, I was careful. I said nothing actionable.”

  I ignored that. “You called his home number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it fuzzy, like a tape, or clear, like digital voice mail?”

  “A tape, I think. What’s wrong?”

  “Honeycutt is the one who ordered Lusk’s death.” She blinked and held her beer with two hands. “He ordered yours, too. You were supposed to go up along with the painting.” She started twisting the bottle. “Honeycutt left for the Seychelles this morning. With any luck, he left before you called and hasn’t heard the message.”

  “Honeycutt was…Honeycutt tried to kill me?”

  “Yes. I want you to call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”

  Her blink rate went up, and her skin colour greyed to pearl.

  “Julia, it’s very important that you call the airport and find out what flight he was on.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to change.”

  As I stripped and changed, I heard her voice rise and fall and finally harden as she jousted with the airlines. When I emerged, her colour was back.

  “The most likely flight was through Lisbon. It left at eight-fifty. He would have had to check in two hours before departure.” She looked at my charcoal silks and black Kenneth Cole shoes. “I don’t understand.”

  “When I break into Honeycutt’s house, I don’t intend to be seen. If I am, I don’t want to be remembered. The best way to be invisible, unmemorable, is to blend in.”

  “Do my clothes pass muster?”

  “You’re staying here.”

  “No. He tried to kill me. I have to do something about that. It’s me he’ll be after if he gets that tape.” She flushed, as though suddenly self-conscious. “I know it’ll be dangerous, but I’m a grown-up. I know what I’m getting into. I can handle myself.”

  She stood there with her hair in a chubby braid, makeup so perfect you could hardly tell she wore it, smelling faintly of European beer. What did someone like Julia Lyons-Bennet know about danger? She knew martial arts as an art and self-defence as theory. Hers was a world of board rooms and galleries, auction houses and banks. She had lived her whole life in civilized enclaves and believed the universe to be an essentially civilized place. Danger to her was just another game that her smarts and good looks and privilege would see her through safely, but danger is not a game. Danger is a casually violent Viking. It doesn’t care about motivation or intention or explanations. When it sits opposite and offers you the cup and dice, you either walk away or play full throttle. Danger, with its well-used axe and huge ham hands, is out to take you for all you’re worth. Luck can work for or against you, but danger loads the dice, it cheats, and when it does you have to pin its hand to the boards with a knife, no hesitation. She wasn’t ruthless enough, she didn’t understand enough.

  “He tried to kill me,” she said again.

  She was a grown-up. She wanted this. “Come, th
en. But don’t get in my way. Meanwhile, in my office, through there, there’s a pine cabinet. Key is in the kitchen, hanging below the clock. In the cabinet there’s a satchel. Bring it, please.”

  How big was that battery? Small enough to have drained in just twenty-four hours? Honeycutt’s house was laid out cleanly enough. I knew where the den was, I knew where the breakers were. Most people put their alarm boxes somewhere easily accessible. Kitchen, probably, or hallway. There should be time.

  I went into the office. Julia was holding the thigh harness and holster. She blushed bright red when she saw me. I put a tape in the answering machine, then switched on the fax machine and dialed.

  “That’s your number.”

  “Yes. Did you find the satchel?”

  She lifted it. I nodded. The phone rang, the machine took it, the fax whined and shrilled and beeped. I dialed again, and again, until I had nearly five minutes’ worth of electronic noncommunication on tape. I slipped the tape and a Sony Walkman into the satchel.

  “We should go now. Eight in the evening is the best time for breaking and entering.” Our break-in would have to be traceless if Honeycutt’s suspicions were not to be aroused.

  I carried the satchel out to the Saab. We took Highway 280 instead of the interstate.

  “Take your jewellery off and put it in the glove compartment. You don’t want to lose an earring at Honeycutt’s and have to go back.” She complied silently.

  The road surface was just-laid blacktop and we’d left streetlights behind a mile or two back. The drive was smooth; the night rushed by like water. Everything was black and white. We could have been exploring the bottom of the sea. Julia seemed to have withdrawn into herself.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked after a while.

  “Jim was my friend.”

  “There’s more to it than that. More than his death on your conscience. Most people would mourn and leave it at that. Look at your life. You have money—not as much as you grew up with, I suspect, but you’re more than comfortable. You’re an art dealer, a corporate art dealer. You don’t even deal with the artists direct, just galleries and auction houses and agents. Yet you have studied at least one martial art; at some point you took a self-defence course that you regard seriously enough to make changes in your everyday life; you’ve obviously studied defensive driving. Why?”

  “To be prepared. For violence.”

  Not nearly the whole truth. “And are you?”

  She looked at me then. In the backwash of the headlights, her eyes were sheened like a Persian cat’s. “I don’t know.”

  There is never any way to know. It happens so fast. A snap of your fingers and the world is different. Most encounters are decided in five or six seconds and if you freeze, you can die. I wasn’t sure there was a way to explain.

  “Have you ever been in a situation?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been shocked? I mean had terrible news or seen something awful happen right in front of you?”

  “Yes.”

  There was pain in that answer. “That’s how it feels when everything goes wrong. It’s as though someone with a knife tried to slice your mind free of your body and everything just automatically starts shutting down. Surprise, shock, whatever you want to call it. The trick to surviving is to believe what your body is telling you, instantly, and then act. Don’t stop and think. There simply isn’t time. In the first split second, getting moving, reacting, is what counts.” She was nodding, and I knew she wanted to understand but I didn’t think she did. “Put your hand palm down on my thigh.”

  To her credit, after a barely perceptible hesitation, she started to lay her hand on my thigh. Without looking at her, without giving her a hint of what I was about to do, I slapped it, hard.

  She whipped the hand away, incredulous.

  “Your first reaction is to pull away, and glare, but imagine if I really meant it. You can’t afford to stop and wonder at it, to try work out why, you just have to accept it and take steps to make sure I’m not going to be in any state to do it again.” She sucked at the back of her hand. Her breasts were rising and falling, faster and faster. Now she was angry. Adrenalin. “That slap hurt but it won’t leave a bruise. If I’d given you a black eye that would have hurt, but no permanent damage. A two-by-four across the ribs might crack a few but you would still be able to run or hit someone. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Pain is just pain. It’s a message. You don’t have to listen. Sometimes you can’t afford to listen.”

  “The Nike school of martial arts. Just Do It.” Her face was perfectly smooth, unreadable, but then she huffed down her nose, half amusement, half cynicism. “Nike was the winged goddess of victory. How appropriate.”

  “We hope.”

  “Are you expecting trouble?”

  “Not particularly.”

  We were driving through Smyrna now. I pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Time to apply some camouflage.”

  We walked to a party store, where I bought two bunches of Mylar balloons, then to a wine shop. “What champagne do you like?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “I could buy something cheap and throw it away, or get something nice and you could drink it afterwards. It’s a legitimate expense, so you’ll end up paying, whichever way.”

  She chose a Mumm’s brut. I paid and we bobbed with the bottle and balloons along to a pharmacy. I asked the pharmacist for latex gloves. He gave me, the bottle and Julia a knowing look. Julia blushed very, very slightly, and lifted her chin. She moved like a cheetah as we left.

  We put the balloons in the backseat and draped my jacket over them so they wouldn’t float about.

  “In a perfect world, how would you hit that pharmacist?”

  “Jern,” she said without hesitation. Palm strike. “Right to the nose.”

  I like a woman who knows her own mind.

  We left the lights of Smyrna behind and once again were whipping through the dark, the Saab following the white line like a tracking dog. The night was alive with scents: jet fuel from Dobbins Air Force Base just over the rise, fading heat of blacktop, the musk of Julia’s hair. There was a sharp, smoky undertone to her scent now; adrenalin was pumping and she was beginning to tense up. My muscles were loose and warm and my heartbeat steady and strong.

  “Almost there. Get some gloves on.”

  She shook out the gloves and her breathing quickened as the faint aromas of talc and latex filled the car. The sense of smell is the most primitive of all, wired directly into the crocodile brain that knows only the basic urges of sex and survival. It conditions very quickly.

  I steered with one hand, punched Honeycutt’s home number into my phone with the other. It rang until the machine picked up. I hung up. No one home, or at least no one was answering the phone. And then we were there, pulling into the driveway, crunching over the gravel. It looked smaller without all the people milling about on the lawn and dim light showing only from the kitchen and one upstairs room. I turned off the car, snapped on gloves, turned to Julia.

  “Look happy, in case there are observers.”

  She carried one bunch of balloons and the champagne. I had the other bunch in one hand, satchel over my shoulder. I looked around, up at the windows, at the door, as if trying to work out if this was the right address for the party. No neighbours’ lights were flicking on.

  The entryway had two steps and was lit with soft yellow, two locks, both at waist height. He had made it very easy.

  “Keep close.” The lock gun’s rubber-sheathed handle was slippery against the latex gloves. I had to steady it against my ribs. Using Julia’s body as a shield, I shoved the prongs into the first lock.

  “Pretend to ring the bell.” The lock clunked, I moved to the second. “Pretend again.” Julia obliged. The second lock thunked back. “When I open the door, follow me in, and smile, just in case. I’ll disable the alarm. You push the door to, and stay just inside. Be very, very quiet.” />
  I looked at my watch, pushed the door open silently, and stepped inside. The air was cool; he hadn’t even turned the air-conditioning down. I listened for five seconds. Apart from the preliminary warning beep-beep-beep of the alarm, there was nothing except the distant hum of air-conditioning and faint burble of the aquarium. In the light of the entryway, the fish glided ghostly and golden. I put my finger to my lips and pointed at the floor. Julia nodded. I trod softly to the wall by the kitchen where the alarm box sat at chin height. Ten seconds down, twenty to go. I pulled out two lengths of black-jacketed wire, one with crocodile clips, the other with soft-tack connectors. I popped the lid off the box, took one look, clipped on one wire, cut another. The beeping stopped. I looked at my watch. Seventeen seconds. I ran up the beautifully carpeted, silent steps to the guest bedroom, opened the closet door, and opened two breakers. The air-conditioning stopped. If I had done this wrong, I only had eight seconds to find out and cut the phone lines.

  From the top of the stairs I saw a faint, very faint light from the aquarium. No noise of bubbles. I relaxed. The battery was almost drained, which meant the alarm system wasn’t getting any power at all. Terrible security.

  I padded downstairs, put the screwdriver, wire clippers and extra wire back in the satchel, hung the box cover back on, but loosely, and beckoned to Julia.

  The kitchen was clean and empty and shadowy beyond the single dim lamp. A Sony answerphone blinked greenly from a countertop. I flipped up the lid, popped out the tape, and handed it to Julia. She opened her mouth. I put my finger to my lips, then took out the Walkman, and gestured for her to use it to listen to the tape. She nodded. I pointed to myself and the doorway, to her and the floor. She nodded again.

  A quick check around the ground floor behind wall hangings, in desk drawers turned up no safe, no cache of interesting papers. I hadn’t expected it to, but it was always best to be certain.

  Back in the kitchen, Julia was tugging the earphones out and giving me the thumbs-up. I put one plug in my ear, played the tape back. Some man talking about the lawn; another leaving a message to call Harry; then Julia; then his sister. I wound it back to the very last phrase from Harry, then played it again, timing Julia’s message. I rewound back to Harry and stopped it. I pulled my tape, connector, and a piece of paper from the satchel, scribbled, Record my tape onto his for exactly two minutes and twenty seconds. Listen to check. Wind tape to end of current messages, put back in machine. She had to hold the note up to the light coming through the windows to read it properly. She nodded. I pointed at myself then at the stairs and before I’d finished she rolled her eyes, pointed at herself then at the floor. My turn to nod.