by Saul Black
Valerie was listening—but only with a frail, distant part of herself. The rest of her was reaching out into the unknown distance. I’m coming, Nick. Stay alive. Do whatever it takes to stay alive. Please hold on. Hold on, my love.
“I was wearing a tight, short white Lycra dress,” Katherine said. “I know: forgive me! White heels, too, dear God. I can carry all white, mind you. With my hair it doesn’t shout tragic bombshell the way red or black might. And with eyes this color you want them to do all the work. You want a blank canvas. I tried rich greens for a while but I looked like a goddamned Christmas decoration. Hang on—” She looked down at the map, then leaned forward again for McLuhan’s benefit. “Five miles. Then take the country road east toward Castle Rock Springs.”
It occurred to Valerie that she still had her headset on. While Katherine spoke to McLuhan, she reached up discreetly and turned the mic off. She wasn’t sure why. The part of her that had been listening to Katherine demanded it.
“I think I’ve told you this before,” Katherine continued, easing back in her seat, “but one of the virtues of being the way I am is sexual telepathy. It’s all in the eyes. You know this, Valerie: what makes you come—whatever might be going on physically—is the knowledge that your partner is right there with you. Knowing what you’re thinking. Seeing you, knowing who you are, what you are. Even the Bible admits it: Genesis 4, verse 1: And Adam knew Eve, his wife.… It’s no accident that ‘knowing’ is perhaps the oldest euphemism for fucking. Shared knowledge of each other, in the end, is the dark bliss.… Anyway, to make an unforgivably long story short, it was good. He knew me. We had mutual visibility. What was in me was in him, notwithstanding it rarely saw the light of day. I’d wondered at the immediacy of the attraction. I wondered no more. It was all rather astonishing, though I lay there in his arms afterward like a cat, delighted by the infallibility of my instincts. We hadn’t needed to exchange a single word. The Devil is most eloquent in his silences.”
She nudged Valerie again with her leg. “You’re looking away again,” she said. “Are you still with me?”
“Yes,” Valerie said, not meeting Katherine’s eye.
Katherine paused for a moment. The squad car passed an eighteen-wheeler. Valerie noticed the driver, a large, dirtily tanned guy with dark eyes and a gray ponytail under a Yankees baseball cap. He was singing along to something on the radio. The lives of people who weren’t Police. She had the mad thought that if Nick survived she’d quit being a cop. She remembered his fantasy of emigration to Polynesia. I restore a boat incredibly slowly and you lie in a hammock.… She made an absurd silent commitment to herself: If Nick lived, she would secretly arrange to go there with him. Maybe they would never come back. If he lived, all the world’s formerly shut-down potential would be open to them. She would have his child. She felt the certainty in her womb, as if she were already carrying it. Nick’s survival would be the license that granted both of them any future they wanted. It was clear to Valerie that as of now she didn’t care if she never saw the inside of a police station again.
“As you can imagine,” Katherine said, “I was smitten. It had been for him the way it had been for me. That much was obvious to both of us. Consider my heartbreak, then, when, in spite of giving him my number, in spite of saying good night with the same mutual transparency that as far as I was concerned guaranteed the beginning of a new and extraordinary affair, I never heard from or saw him again. Not for many, many years.”
“The Man in the Mask,” Valerie said.
For a long moment Katherine just looked at her. Then she shook her head. No.
“When I did meet him again, we recognized each other right away, though he pretended not to. There was no forgetting each other. There was no erasing what had passed between us that night. But neither was there any erasing the fact that in the intervening years so much had changed, for both of us. Besides, the circumstances of our meeting would have made it impossible for him to acknowledge me. I could tell—with the same telepathy that had stamped that first encounter with its imprimatur of collusion—that he would claim not to know me. Not to have known me. Like Peter denying Christ.”
Valerie stared at her. She knew nothing, except the sense of something vast and annihilating, very close. Katherine’s face was like a portal to something infinite. An emptily gleaming hell.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” Katherine said.
Valerie didn’t answer. Katherine’s eyes were unbearable.
“I’m sorry, Valerie,” Katherine said. “It was Nick.” Then she leaned forward and said to McLuhan, “Take the next right. Two miles, then look for a narrow road on the left.”
45
Valerie didn’t speak for a while. She was almost wholly relieved—because her reaction was simple: Katherine was lying. Lying desperately. Lying comically, if she truly thought there was any chance that she, Valerie, would believe her. She was almost wholly relieved.
Almost.
She couldn’t help knowing Nick’s parents had lived in San Diego for several years, nor that he’d spent summer vacations there, between college and the academy. That she couldn’t stop this concession meant something.
No. It meant nothing. It was Napoleon’s white horse. Nothing.
But the whole of her world depended on it. The scale of the potential loss made even the smallest scrap of possibility glow, a solitary spark that could burn down the house, the city, the love, the life, everything. It could burn her away into nothingness. Even in the midst of her vast reflex, denial was the understanding that if it were true—if it were true—there would be no recovery for them. Ever.
Katherine’s repeated questions about Nick. Written off as the woman’s instinct for provocation.
No recovery? Ever? Weirdly, a strange part of her wondered if that were true. Her weary realist, her cop habit of being unsurprised by anything found itself going through the prosaic logic. Suppose he had fucked her? What was that except a young guy fucking a young woman he knew nothing about? In itself it was ordinary. It was predictable. It was the most ordinary and predictable thing in the world. He wasn’t responsible for what Katherine was, what she became, what she did. She was a hot girl at a party. It wasn’t a crime.
But it was a crime if he hadn’t told her.
There was no universe in which he oughtn’t to have told her.
If it were true then it was lying by omission. If it were true then it was a lie bigger than love. And there was no recovering from that. Ever.
What was in me was in him, notwithstanding it rarely saw the light of day.
Valerie’s relief came back. That was a lie. She knew Nick. What was in Katherine wasn’t in him. Katherine shouldn’t have added that claim. It was a detail too far. Nick no more wanted what Katherine wanted than she, Valerie, did.
But what had he said when she’d confessed her childhood cruelties to Dalia Poole? It’s what we do. It’s what we find our way out of. You can’t seriously …
No. It was impossible. Nick wasn’t that way, or at least no more that way than the average fantasist, herself included. It was nothing. Katherine was lying.
“Valerie?” Katherine said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You don’t believe me.” Not a question. “Of course you don’t. Why would you?”
“No,” Valerie said. “I don’t believe you.”
“I didn’t expect you to.” Katherine looked out of the window. McLuhan had slowed, looking for the narrow road. There were trees on both sides. No road lights now. “Proof is vulgar,” Katherine said, still peering out. “Evidence is vulgar. Resolution, in fact, is always vulgar. It’s only ambiguity that keeps us going. But ask yourself how I know Nick has a birthmark in the shape of a little arrowhead on his left hip. Not visible except in the context of intimacy.” Then to McLuhan: “Here. Take the left and pull over.”
The land was rural. The trees on the right-hand side had given way to open fi
elds, though on the left their ranks were still dense. Evergreens, as far as Valerie could tell. The sky was clear and black around the swarming stars.
“All right, listen,” Katherine said to McLuhan. “Put the following GPS coordinates in your phone. It can’t be more than a mile from here, according to the map, but this place probably has tracks all over it. I don’t know what sort of building you’re looking for.” She gave McLuhan the numbers. “That’s right to five decimal places,” she said. “It should take you to the exact spot, but obviously you don’t want him to hear you coming.”
McLuhan relayed the information to the SWAT team. “Pull up the satellite view,” he said. “I need to know how close we can get.”
It took a few minutes. The team leader got out and came over to the squad car, iPad in hand. He was a stocky, dark-featured guy in his midthirties with a look of dense muscle underneath the fatigues. HOOPER, his name tag said. McLuhan rolled down the window.
“Okay,” Hooper said, lifting the screen for them to see. “If the numbers are right this is the spot. Looks like a private residence, maybe a farm. Nearest neighbor half a mile away. Two hundred yards from here we take a right. Another hundred and there’s what appears to be a long, gated driveway on the left. We’re going to have to kill the lights and drop the vehicles before we get to that. I’m saying just about…” He traced the image of the lane with his finger. “Here. That leaves us around fifty yards plus whatever the length of the drive.”
“Fine,” McLuhan said. Then to Arden: “You’re babysitting with the uniforms.”
“Jesus, boss—”
“No argument. You stay with Glass and the officers. That’s an order.”
“Come on, Agent,” Katherine said. “You know there’s never a dull moment with me. I’ll regale you with tales of my excesses.”
“And you,” McLuhan said, turning in his seat and staring Katherine down, “shut the fuck up and listen. The cover for this little jaunt is a prisoner transfer. As far as the paperwork goes you’re on your way to another facility. Understand me: I’ve already drafted the report of how you were killed in an escape attempt. You’ve no idea how much I’m looking for a reason to submit it. You do anything other than sit absolutely still and you will be shot. Believe me, we can make it look however we want it to. I have that on the highest authority. Are we clear?”
“Well that’s me put in my place,” Katherine said. “Were you spanked as a child, Agent?”
“If she sneezes,” McLuhan said to Arden, “shoot her in the back of the head.”
* * *
They left the vehicles as planned, with Arden and the two local uniforms guarding Katherine. Valerie’s insides were a swirling emptiness. The night was soft and silent, the stars brilliant as if with a collective delight. Images of Nick in the video clip flashed and collided with the new material, grossly implanted: Katherine running her fingernails over the birthmark on his hip. It was impossible. She could neither accept nor deny it. Only keep suffering the repeated contradiction. It was like being stuck in a dream she knew was a dream but from which she was forced to concede she might never wake. She went through the motions of putting on the vest like an automaton.
At the driveway gate Hooper and two of his team went ahead in night-vision goggles. The intel came back quickly: the building was a two-story house with three access points, front and back doors plus one set of French doors that opened onto a yard at the rear. Blinds drawn. Lights on in two ground-floor rooms and one upstairs. Possible basement, possible attic. A 2015 Jeep Cherokee was parked at the front. A derelict Ford fifty yards from the main building, wheelless, on blocks. No sounds from within. Hooper’s evaluation was simple: standard rapid entry and room clearance. Go in hard, fast, strong. Two men at each access, Valerie and McLuhan following as cleared.
“Okay,” McLuhan said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The next few minutes for Valerie were a blur—the sound of the doors busted; the repeated shouts of “Clear! Clear!” as one by one the rooms were confirmed empty: a kitchen bare but for wall cupboards and a small wooden table with an open laptop on it; the smell of bare plaster and floorboards; a camping cot with a rumpled sleeping bag half unzipped; empty water bottles; the dark hairs on the backs of McLuhan’s hands; the staircase with several uprights missing from its banister; a bedroom window with a hole the size of a tennis ball in its glass.
There was a basement—a cellar, rather: nothing in it but utility meters and a few rotting plywood crates.
The house was unoccupied.
Everyone had seen the laptop. Hooper put a man at each exit. He and the remaining two SWATs joined Valerie and McLuhan in the kitchen. The air in the small room was heavy with their adrenaline. She could smell the sweat in the tough fabric of their fatigues.
“What does it say?” McLuhan said.
There was a Post-it note stuck to the laptop’s screen, just below the Web cam.
“‘For Nick, hit any key,’” Valerie read aloud.
“Don’t touch it—”
Valerie hit a key.
A split second in which every heart in the room stopped—then the screen opened.
On it was the Man in the Mask, sitting at a desk, smiling. Given that the only times Valerie had seen him in the mask he’d been naked, he looked now—dressed in a plain black T-shirt (and presumably trousers)—slightly ridiculous. Like a role-play enthusiast who’d simply forgotten to remove his headgear.
“Hello there!” he said, smiling. “I’m so glad you made it. How’s everyone doing?”
Eugene. The smile and the voice. There was no mistaking it, despite the mask. The same impish buoyancy. Eugene Trent. Or whatever the fuck his real name was. Nick’s squash partner. More than a year. All those conversations. All this time.
The room behind him was bare brick, with what looked like tarps spread on the floor. The room from the video clip, Valerie knew. Not a room in the house in which they were currently standing.
“I need to see clear evidence that Nicholas Blaskovitch is alive,” she heard herself say. It was odd to her. Something in her still functioned, despite her body’s state of contained madness.
“Now, now, now,” Eugene said. “Let’s not have that peremptory tone, Valerie. You look magnificent in that getup, by the way. First things first. Have a look at this.”
He picked up the laptop at his end and panned its Web cam left. They saw three monitors, between them showing camera angles of every room in the house they were in, as well as a couple of views of the exterior. Redundantly, everyone in the room looked up and began scanning the ceiling. The kitchen’s camera was in the back corner, angled to take in the optimal view. Valerie heard McLuhan sigh. The SWAT guys were silent—and very still. Valerie thought of the scene in movies where soldiers suddenly realize they’re standing in a minefield. Like the kids’ game of “statues.”
The laptop returned to its original position.
“So,” Eugene said. “That’s that out of the way. Now let’s deal with this.”
He panned the Web cam to the right.
Nick.
As she’d seen him before. Mouth duct taped, shirt open, hands cuffed above his head and fastened to a chain suspended from the ceiling. His ankles were in restraints just like Katherine’s, attached to bolts in the floor. Not quite on tiptoe. He could take some of his weight on the balls of his feet. Some, but not all. Valerie thought of how long he’d been in that position.
His eyes were closed and his head hung forward on his chest. The same signs of a beating, but as far as she could tell, nothing added since then. Nothing visible, she corrected herself.
Eugene, momentarily out of view with the adjusted angle, now reappeared, holding a bottle of water in his left hand—and a black rubber-handled knife in his right. He approached Nick.
“You seeing this?” he said.
He opened the water bottle and poured some of its contents over Nick’s face. No response.
“Oops
,” he said. “Hang on. He’s still with us, I promise you.” He yanked Nick’s head back by his hair and emptied the remainder of the bottle over his face, shaking Nick’s skull while he did it. Nick spluttered and roared back to consciousness. His eyes opened.
“There we go,” Eugene said. “Good morning, Nicholas! Welcome back. Say hi to your lady. She’s on-screen. Look, over there.”
Valerie watched as Nick struggled to focus. Eugene picked up the laptop and brought it closer, turned so that Nick could see it was her. Eugene’s hand reached into the shot and tore the duct tape from Nick’s mouth. It reopened a split on his lip. Blood welled. Valerie closed her eyes. Forced them open again. His face was drained. She remembered the final phase of the women. The loss of everything, even pity for themselves. He wasn’t there yet. But she could see he knew that death was with him, like a third person in the room. Resignation was in his eyes. It’s all in the eyes, Katherine had said.
“We’re coming, Nick,” she said quietly. Her throat felt all but closed.
