by Saul Black
“You guys completely legit?” she asked.
“Completely. We’re owned by Magisteria, the international chain of which you’ve no doubt heard. They insist on full compliance with California state law, fiscal transparency, rigid enforcement of health and safety regulations. You name it, we don’t hide it. Ah—here’s Gigi.”
Valerie turned to see a petite girl in her early twenties approaching. A dark Cleopatra bob and heavily made-up eyes. Not yet—the ripped jeans and cropped Aerosmith T-shirt said—dressed for work. Francis did the introductions and left them to it. Valerie and Gigi took seats at the nearest table.
“Quite a character,” Valerie said.
Gigi rolled her eyes. “I thought it was totally an act, at first,” she said. “But he’s really like that. The stuff the guy knows is insane. Speaks Japanese, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been here a year and I still have absolutely no clue what his deal is. He told me he’s writing a book. Sex and the Soul of America. It’s probably true. Either way, the dude knows how to run a club.”
Valerie pulled prints of all the Sophia images from her purse. Gigi nodded. “Like I said when I saw them, I can’t swear to it. I mean apart from the stage it’s not exactly bright in here. But the hair looks right, the mouth. She had terrific hands, really beautiful. And she did say her name was Sophia.”
“What did you talk about?”
“She was asking about working conditions in the club. You know, customer scum-rating, what the management’s like, are the girls easy to get along with. Said she was looking to pick up maybe six months’ work before heading back to L.A.”
“She was from Los Angeles?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Did she come in alone?”
“As far as I know.”
“She mention any guys? Boyfriend?”
“Breakup. Apparently she’d been seeing some guy but it had gone sour. Some loaded guy, I figured, given the wardrobe.”
“Did she tell you his name?”
“No, not that I remember.”
“Not Adam? Or Dwight?”
“I really don’t think she said his name. We spoke for like, ten, fifteen minutes tops. I’d finished my shift and I was pooped. Just wanted to get home and crash.”
“How did she seem to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nervous? Scared? Confident? Experienced?”
Gigi thought about it. “Tired,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, she was in terrific shape, but she was definitely the wrong side of thirty. Couple more years, she’s a niche market. She looked like she knew that. But not nervous. Definitely not scared. To be honest I thought she had an ace up her sleeve.”
“How so?”
Another pause, while Gigi wrestled with articulation. “She had a sort of smiling calm,” she said. “Does that make sense? Like she knew something the world didn’t. Like maybe she had something good coming. I mean, this is just me guessing, you know? This is just…” She shrugged. “It was just the vibe I got.”
“What about where she was staying in San Francisco? Did she say?”
Gigi tilted her head and looked away, searching the mental files. “Might have been Nob Hill,” she said. “I think she said Nob Hill. Which would fit with the loaded guy, I guess.”
“Exactly when did she come in?”
“Yeah, I knew you were going to ask me that. I’m hopeless with dates. It was back in early summer. Maybe three months? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. It could have been June or even like, the end of May?”
Valerie made the notes.
“This is something I think about,” Gigi said. “You know on all the TV shows when someone’s on trial for something and they say, like, where were you on the night of so-and-so between six and nine P.M.? Jeez. I don’t know where I was yesterday. I should start keeping a diary. I used to, when I was a kid.”
Valerie nodded. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“I don’t think so. But can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“What’d she do? I mean, you’re Homicide. She kill someone?”
Valerie got to her feet. “It’s just a line of inquiry,” she said, for about the thousandth time in her life.
“You like being a cop?”
“Sometimes.” Lie. All the time. All the time. Mainly because I don’t know how to be anything else. She looked down at the girl in front of her. She seemed a child. Valerie began to wonder what the story was, what had led her here, whether there was hope for anything better. Who her mother was.
Stop. No point.
“Do me a favor,” she said, handing Gigi her card. “If she comes in again, try to get her surname, her number. And call me—okay?”
“Okay. Oh, hey, there’s one thing. It probably doesn’t matter.”
“Yes?”
“She didn’t sound L.A. Her accent, I mean. Sounded East Coast to me.”
“New York?”
Gigi shrugged. “I don’t know. But definitely East.”
“All right, thanks.”
Gigi smiled up at her. For no reason she could explain, Valerie felt afraid for her, suddenly. There was still brightness here. The soul hadn’t quite lost its expectation of happiness. Borrowed time.
“You get any trouble from anyone here, you let me know,” she said, surprised at herself.
“Trouble?”
Valerie felt ridiculous, ambushed by sentiment. “Just … You have my card.”
“I can take care of myself,” Gigi said with a grin. It was piercing to Valerie, the buoyancy, the optimism. She nodded, turned, and hurried away, practically tripping over her own feet. You are losing your mind, Valerie.
“But thanks!” Gigi called, laughing.
Francis was hovering at the exit.
“Any joy?” he asked.
“You have the pictures. If Sophia comes in again, you know where to contact me. In the meantime we’re going to need to see the CCTV footage for May and June. Call my office when you’ve pulled it and someone will arrange for its collection or transfer.”
“Will do,” Francis said. “I’ll have to clear it with the head office, naturally.”
“Naturally,” Valerie said. “And if it takes longer than forty-eight hours I’ll be back with a warrant.”
32
September 7, 2017
When the left rear tire on his 1989 VW camper blew in the desert just after 4:00 P.M., it felt to Pete Jardine like the first time he’d stopped since leaving New York five days before.
Five days? Six? Time had ceased to be a measurable line. Instead a series of snapshots that bloomed and faded. Silver mountains under a blue sky. A burned-out Texaco. A lake on which he’d watched a solitary cormorant preening itself, savagely. He had continued to function. He had eaten, gone to the bathroom, slept. But like a quiet automaton, a melancholy robot that had been given all the (insufficient) programming it was ever going to get. Somewhere back there on the road, he’d turned forty. When he thought of the digits, four and zero, they seemed the definitive notation of precisely where and what he was right now: an ordinarily betrayed American man, stranded in the middle of nowhere.
He got out of the VW, followed immediately by the dog, Pablo, a rangy mongrel the color of burned toast. He and Vicky had got him from the ASPCA shelter on Ninety-second Street six years ago, when love had been the central certainty and the world a bright arena designed solely for their own adventures. Pete hadn’t decided to bring him when he left New York. Pablo had just followed him out of the apartment and got into the van and Pete hadn’t had the capacity to turf him out. Hadn’t thought about it, even. In those moments, everything had happened in a dreamy, inevitable flow.
The desert afternoon simmered. Pete stretched, looked up at the blue-white sky. Sun-heat fitted the back of his head like a skullcap. He set Pablo’s bowl down and half filled it with water from the plastic bottle. He didn’t know if he was in Nevada or California. He’d kep
t off the interstates. Lonely blacktop and small towns he’d never heard of. He’d begun with the clear thought of driving to the Pacific. Don’t think about anything until you get to the Pacific. Everything could be postponed until he stood with his bare feet in the cooling surf. But now that he was within reach of it he didn’t feel ready. Maybe he would head north for a while, if only for the milder weather. The Pacific went all the way up to Canada, after all.
He went to look at the tire. It was a write-off. The thought of changing it gave him some pleasure. It would provide him with meaningful action for the first time since New York. Manual labor. There was honor in it. He opened the trunk and took out the jack and lug wrench. Pablo, tongue lolling like a little pink scroll, went mooching off into the scrub.
Vicky’s face from that last afternoon. It had happened in the way these things happen, courtesy of simple cause and effect. He had come home from work just after midday with the beginning of a migraine. It was a Friday. Vicky was supposed to be having lunch with her friend Nadine. As soon as Pete entered the apartment he knew it wasn’t empty. There was a reflex flurry of panic when he thought: Someone’s broken in—but his body had barely tensed (he’d felt his scalp tighten at the thought of a burglar, a man he’d have to confront, fight) when he heard Vicky in the bedroom. And in that moment he had known not only what was happening but that everything for quite a long time had been leading him to it.
The desert around him was bone-pale. The lug wrench was already hot in his sweating hands. Fix this and pull off at the next town. Drink an ice-cold beer. Eat a refrigerated ham sandwich. The last few days had returned him to simple needs and impulses. It was a quiet, blissful madness to have left his life behind him—but he knew it couldn’t last. It made him sad to think of going back. Doubly sad, given the smallness of what had happened. Next to the world’s genocides and famines it was nothing. At the time he had thought it was unbearable. But the word “unbearable” made a liar of you if you didn’t kill yourself. And he hadn’t. Wasn’t going to. The death of another middle-class marriage was nothing—yet his reaction to it had felt like the most natural thing he’d ever done. As natural, in fact, as getting married in the first place.
He and Vicky had met at a party six years ago. Vicky had arty energy and ambition and petite bitchy blond good looks, but not enough talent for any of it to come to anything. There were unfinished novels. Acting classes. Poetry slams. A year singing in a band that never played anything but bars. Whereas Pete had graduated NYU film school in ’98 knowing that he didn’t have what it took to be a filmmaker, and had instead gone to work in his uncle’s interior design company, where, as of four years ago, he’d become a partner. Vicky didn’t mind the money, but after a while she dropped the pretense of having a creative career of her own. Then it was just the dangerous energy and petite bitchy blond good looks. As a couple they understood what they had: Pete was the steady force keeping Vicky—just—from going off the rails. It was a joke between them, that he was reliable, romantic, conservative. It was what she loved in him, his tender sanity.
Somewhere along the line, Pete had understood that she had decided to love his tender sanity because she feared how much she would hate him for it if she didn’t. He loved her, on the other hand, without inversion or compromise. The only fracture was his suspicion that he wasn’t enough for her. In spite of her artistic failures she was hungrier than him, riskier, more imaginative and more violently alive. Worse, it became apparent to him after the first flush of mutual adoration that he wasn’t entirely floating her boat in the sack. There was a yearning impatience in her when they had sex, as if she were confined to a space too small for her. She often, post-coitally, picked a fight with him. (A lousy reversal of make-up sex, in fact.) Without asking, he knew she’d had better lovers before him. He wasn’t rough with her, for one thing. They’d worked their way through a little bondage and spanking at her insistence, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. Again, it had been made into an affectionate joke, what a gentle guy he was. But the yearning impatience in her remained, sometimes became outright anger. The last couple of years, their evenings had featured stretches of uneasy silence, intolerable if not for Netflix. They saw more of their friends, separately. Sunday mornings, which had formerly been filled with lazy potential—brunch, cocktails, the Times, sex—became the week’s dreaded low point.
And yet there was still love. There was still, from time to time, sex. They didn’t have the arguments. It was worse: They didn’t bother having the arguments. They were like a couple standing on a damp lawn at night watching, sadly, as their house burned to the ground.
Which was why, when he pushed open their bedroom door that afternoon five or six or ten days ago to find Vicky facing him, naked on all fours, getting pounded in the ass by a muscular guy with Celtic tattoos on his forearms and his hands wrapped in her short blond hair, Pete’s overwhelming feeling was one of sad recognition, as if he was seeing the obvious punch line to a bad, long-winded joke. There was even (he thought now, unscrewing the last lug nut) a feeling of wretched relief.
He hadn’t said a word. Vicky had looked up at him with cat eyes full of ecstasy and heartbreak. The guy fucking her had his eyes scrunched shut, as if performing a feat of tremendous concentration. Absurdly, he didn’t see Pete the whole time. Pablo walked out of the study and joined Pete in the hallway. Pete watched for a moment, felt his entire life deflate, then turned and walked out of the apartment. Pablo followed him. Pete had got into the VW, started the engine, and begun driving. The Pacific was a blue promise on his mind’s horizon. He would get there and wade in up to his shins. Until he’d done that, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
All four lug nuts were off. He eased the wheel from the threaded bolts. Somewhere in the scrub the dog was barking. It sounded quite a way off. Pete straightened. “Pablo!” he called. “Pablo?”
More barking.
“Pablo! Here, boy. Pablo, come on.”
Silence. Then more barking. It sounded, incredibly, like there was more than one dog. Someone camping out here? Pablo wasn’t the friendliest canine when it came to other dogs. Pete sighed. The heat and the work with the wheel had brought out a sweat. He squinted in the direction the dog had gone.
“Pablo?”
Nothing. Low stunted dry bushes obscured his view. The air in the distance rippled. He locked the van. Deal with the spare when you’ve found the dog. Urban reflex made him check his phone. No reception. He took the lug wrench with him, though he didn’t quite know why.
In the heat it felt like a long time before he heard the dogs again. He looked back toward the road. The white roof of the VW was visible, but it was farther than he’d imagined.
“Pablo?”
Growls and the sound of scuffling, off to his left. Maybe fifty meters. Then snarls—and a yelp of pain.
“Pablo!”
Pete started to run.
The dog was bent low, hackles up, facing off two coyotes over a dark patch of dug-up earth. There was blood on his muzzle. More blood on his flank.
Pete didn’t think. For a moment absolutely everything left him except fear of the coyotes and fear for his dog.
Blank, surrendered wholly to an instinct he didn’t know he possessed, he screamed and charged the coyotes, flailing with the wrench.
The animals turned tail and fled.
Pablo got, trembling, to his feet and limped to his owner,
“Jesus, Pab … Hold on, let me take a look. Easy. Easy, boy.”
The wound in the flank wasn’t deep, but the left foreleg was gashed to the bone. Pete stuffed the lug wrench into the back of his jeans and picked the dog up. Pablo was oven hot, panting.
Quick with the spare wheel. Vet. Shots. Fuck. Rabies?
Pete was trembling himself. Adrenaline in this heat. His arms felt weak and light. He was drenched in sweat. The afternoon silence was a kind of noise.
He glanced down into the earth the animals had dug.
E
ven with the adrenaline flowing he wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
PART
TWO
33
1991–2003
Long before she became Sophia, desired by men and envied by women, she was Abigail. Her middle name, which everyone preferred. Even her mother.
* * *
The sad thing was that Abigail loved her mother, in spite of everything. If Joanna Lake had been bad all the time it would have been easier: Abigail could have hated her, simply. But Joanna wasn’t bad all the time. Sometimes she was wonderful. Or at least had wonderful impulses.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said to Abigail one afternoon. It was a raw Philadelphia day, the wind hurling itself around in the rain. Joanna was in bed under the comforter, shivering. A loose windowpane rattled in the room next door. Abigail was supposed to be at school, but Joanna had been sick when she got home late in the night. Abigail had found her asleep on the bathroom floor with her hair in a sour splatter of puke and her makeup in ugly streaks on her face. She’d been fully dressed in the clothes she’d gone out in, skinny jeans and the short green leather jacket over a gray roll-neck sweater, silver hoop earrings, and the dozen clinking bangles Abigail loved. Even passed out, Joanna’s magical glitteriness had still been plain to see, but spoiled and dirty. It had made Abigail think of the Christmas tree she’d seen that time stuffed into a garbage can, still with its tinsel crushed and clinging.
“Where?” Abigail asked. She was gathering up clothes from the bedroom floor. It had been her plan to get quarters from Joanna for the laundromat down the block, where the owner, Mr. Lee, knew her and usually gave her a Coke or a donut for free. She’d been wearing her current clothes, including the torn red parka that was too small for her, for three days. Besides, the laundromat was filled with dreamy heat. The house, on the other hand, was freezing since the gas had been cut off. You could see your breath.
“Anywhere,” Joanna said. “The world’s our oyster.”
