"Stupid enough not to realize when someone cares about you."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
She looked at me.
"What do you think it means?"
Footsteps scuffed up the sidewalk behind us. I heard voices, two of them, the low, self-conscious murmurs of men who were used to being quiet. Gobi grabbed me and yanked me into the shadows.
A second later I leaned back out. Up the street I saw two men walking toward the BMW. One wore khakis and a barn coat. The other was dressed in a leather jacket, and I didn't need to see the teardrop tattoo on his cheek to know who they were.
"Shit," I whispered, "it's those thugs from downtown. What do we do?"
Not waiting for me, she seized my arm and pulled me up to the front steps of the brownstone, keeping our backs to the sidewalk while she rapped on the door. Seconds later, I heard latches scraping and the door opened. A very tall, extremely glamorous hostess in a formal gown and five-inch lashes was standing there with a martini in her hand. The liquor made her smile look like it had been put on sideways. "Well, hello."
"Hello," Gobi said. "I hope we're not too late for the party."
"Don't be ridiculous, darling," the hostess giggled, tossing her long blond hair. "It's early" Over her shoulder, I saw clusters of people dancing and drinking, their faces barely visible in little pools of dim light. "Come inside."
The hostess disappeared immediately after letting us through the door. The air was smoky, dense with perfume and the smell of sour wine breath. Gobi and I moved through a marble entryway with a high ceiling and a crystal chandelier. Oil paintings, glass sculptures, and doorways funneled down into a formal sitting room and lavishly appointed dining area, all filled with people talking over the thump of urban hip-hop. From one of the back rooms I heard a woman scream with laughter while a man's voice said, "Nope, nope, nope ... never in a million years..."
Party guests, the very rich and their friends, had broken off into special little subcommittees of twos and threes. I saw a couple kissing on a Persian rug next to a coffee table full of red plastic cups, having reached a moment of perfect invisibility. Nobody cared that they were there. The party had reached the point at which the rules weren't in effect anymore.
Gobi gestured at the staircase in front of us. The message was clear: We're going up.
"Forget it," I said. "I'm staying here."
"Fair enough." She glanced out at the street. "Bring the car around."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"You hot-wired it, remember?"
"So this time, you do it."
"I don't know how."
"Weren't you paying attention?"
"Yeah," I said, "but I'm not a car thief any more than you're a foreign exchange student who wrote that PowerPoint about the New York Stock Exchange."
She flicked her eyes up and to the left, where we're taught people normally look while accessing memory. "The New York Stock Exchange is located at Eleven Wall Street. It is the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at two point eight trillion dollars. Shall I continue?"
"Nobody likes a smart aleck."
"I was paying attention, Perry," she said. "Weren't you?"
24
Attach a small photograph of something important to you and explain its significance. (Stanford)
After slipping back through the front door, I stood for a moment perfectly still on the front steps of the brownstone, checking out Eighty-Fifth Street. There was no sign of anyone else around. Except for the faint rumble of the music behind me, the world was very quiet, still enough that I could hear the slow tidal pull and release of my breath.
Something scurried across the street—a rat, I thought—and disappeared between some trash cans.
Gradually I descended the steps, careful to keep my footsteps silent. There was no sign of the two guys I'd seen earlier. The BMW sat where we had left it, in front of the fire hydrant. I wasn't sure that I could get the engine hot-wired again, but I had watched what Gobi did the first time and thought I might be able to pull it off. That was ridiculous, of course, but my mind got as far as Gobi and just sort of stopped.
I crept up to the BMW, opened the driver's side door, and lowered myself in behind the wheel. The screwdriver that I'd pulled from the steering column was nowhere to be found.
I looked over at Gobi's bag, slumped in the passenger seat like some silent third party that had followed us dutifully through the night. Reaching inside, my hand passed over piles of clothing, boxes of ammunition, two knives, a leather shoulder harness, and a manila envelope.
I took the envelope out and opened it.
A picture fell out and onto my lap.
I picked it up and looked at it.
The photo was old and faded, creased down the middle, as if it had been folded and unfolded hundreds of times, shoved down at the bottom of suitcases, and buried in pockets. It showed two little girls in long, dark dresses, standing next to a tree in front of a modest one-story house. I guessed they were about six or seven years old. The sky behind them was a peculiar shade of greenish gray.
Both girls wore their hair pinned up away from their forehead in the stark, severe style that I recognized from Gobi's days as a foreign exchange student at Upper Thayer. One of the girls clutched a doll; the other was cradling a small, slightly annoyed-looking tortoiseshell cat, its tail dangling from the girl's arms. A small round table stood on the lawn in front of them, set up with teacups, saucers, spoons, napkins, and a teapot. Both of them were smiling shyly, as if whoever took the picture had surprised them in the middle of their favorite game.
My conscious mind absorbed what my instincts had already realized: one of the girls was Gobi; the other was so similar that she could have been her twin. I couldn't exactly say how I knew which was which; some nuance of the smile, a subtle glint of humor that the other, more earnest girl didn't reveal.
I held the photo directly up to my eyes, looking more closely.
Both girls were wearing pendants around their necks.
Half-hearts.
I am Death.
That was when the two men sat up from the back seat.
"Good night, sweetheart," the one with the teardrop tattoo said, opening his jacket, and I saw the sawed-off shotgun emerge from under his arm just before he swung the barrel over the seat, cracking me across the bridge of my nose. I felt myself sinking down, one more square peg pounded into the round hole of oblivion.
25
Where do you see yourself in ten years? (Rutgers)
A dripping sound awakened me, the echoing subterranean plip-plop of water forming puddles in some underground space.
The next thing I noticed was the pain.
It started in my nose. I couldn't breathe. My throat and sinuses felt plugged up, waxed shut with hunks of clotted blood. Pain throbbed through my facial bones and ran down my neck, branching into my arms and wrists.
My hands were tied behind me. Turning my head slowly, I saw that I was in a metal folding chair in some kind of dimly lit industrial basement. Although I couldn't see more than twenty yards in any given direction, I could make out vague shapes of exposed pipes and light fixtures overhead, and the dripping sound was coming from somewhere beyond that, from some piece of leaky plumbing recessed into the crossbeams and cobwebs. It was cold and damp down here, the gray space receding far back into a series of smaller warrens and alcoves. Rusty lengths of chain and rope dangled from the pipes over my head. Some of the chains had meathooks hanging off the ends of them.
I heard a sound and looked over.
The sound came again, a grating, scratching noise. Twenty feet of exposed gray concrete in front of me, Gobi sat tied to her own chair.
Whatever the two guys outside had done to me, they had done much worse to her. Her lips were swollen and split open. Her entire right eye had puffed shut, leaving only a thin, downward-slanting slit with a pupil glinting moist and terribly aware. A lo
ng razor slash crisscrossed her left cheek down to her chin, and when she opened her mouth, I saw that one of her front teeth had been knocked out.
She was staring down, murmuring to herself in Lithuanian.
"Gobi?"
She didn't answer.
"Gobi?"
She tilted her head and looked at me with her one good eye.
"Where are we?"
She cocked her head, listening. From somewhere above us, we heard faint voices and the squeak of floorboards as boots thudded overhead, stopped, and moved on.
"Where did those guys take us?"
She shook her head for silence. The footsteps crossed above us again and I heard another voice, a woman, but I couldn't make out what was being said. The pain was making me breathe more heavily, and the air whistling through my nose blocked out most of the sound. I tried to dredge up details from after Teardrop Tattoo had smashed me in the face with the shotgun barrel, but everything after that was a tremulous, blood-soaked blur. I vaguely remembered begging whoever it was to stop, and the sound of their laughter, growing fainter.
My eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness now.
That was when I saw the cages.
They looked like kennels for big dogs, except with thicker bars and padlocks dangling open from their latches. The ones that I saw from here were all empty except for stained newspaper on the bottom and balled-up scraps of something that might have been rags. It reminded me of the Russian's operation in Brooklyn, and I wondered if we'd somehow ended up back there again.
"They are for people," Gobi whispered.
"What?"
"The cages."
I stared. "They put people in those things?"
Gobi tilted her head upward at the indistinct voices and footsteps. Then came a sound like someone dropping a series of increasingly heavy wooden blocks down the stairs. A moment later, a bright oval of high-powered light swung across the walls around me, carving out exaggerated shadows of imaginary objects—a vulture, a wolf's head, the serrated teeth of a bear trap. One by one they disappeared.
The footsteps slowed, approaching. The man behind the flashlight plodded in front of me and stopped, pouring light directly into Gobi's face. He was wearing a long cattleman's coat that went almost down to his ankles, and the collar was flipped up so that the only part of him that I could actually see was the apex of his wide bald head. It was covered with stiff little tufts of hair like bristles on a boar's snout.
"Gobija Zaksauskas," he said in a heavy accent that could have been eastern European, Russian, or some other combination. I realized he was holding something in his hand, some sort of ID. "That is you?"
She nodded and muttered back in Lithuanian.
"These papers are forgeries," the man said. "What is your real name?"
"Tatiana Kazlauskieni."
"I'll ask you again. What is your name?"
"Amelia Earhart."
"Lying pig," the man said. "You think this is funny?"
"I think it is hilarious."
"I will show you funny."
He stepped in front of Gobi, blocking my view of her, and did something fast and brutal with his hand. There was a slap and a hollow thump, and Gobi coughed with pain.
"Now," the man said, "what is your name?"
"The Virgin Mary."
"Who trained you?"
"The Holy Spirit."
Another clank and a thump, and this time Gobi cried out loud.
"You asshole!" I shouted. "Leave her alone!"
The man was making little grunting noises down in his chest cavity, as if breathing cost him effort. "I think we have a cage for you down here somewhere," he said. "For your friend too"—the flashlight beam pivoted around and hit my face, momentarily blinding me—"although he might not be worth keeping."
"He has nothing to do with this," Gobi said.
The man turned back to her, dragging a chain across the bare floor. "Did you speak to me, gypsy trash?"
"I said—"
Whack! The hand clapped down and slammed into her with full force. Again I didn't see where it actually made contact, but it must have hurt even more, because Gobi let out a sharp cry.
"You will speak when spoken to." The man's tone had changed again. Now it was brisk and didactic, like that of an obedience instructor training an obstinant dog, and I hated him for it, the hate momentarily eclipsing all fear and reason. "Do you understand?"
"It is not complicated," Gobi said.
"You have been very stupid tonight," the man told her. "Did you not think we would be ready for you when you came?"
Gobi said nothing, just maintained eye contact, chin tilted defiantly upward.
"Who sent you?"
She didn't move.
"I asked you a question." The hand swung up again, dangling the chain this time, and I saw him run it slowly over her face, streaking the blood that trickled from her nostrils, smearing it upward into her hair. "Where did you get your information?"
No answer from Gobi. I cleared my throat.
"Listen," I said. "Sir."
The man lumbered back around to look at me. This time he kept the flashlight trained low, allowing me my first real look at him. The face was bulbous and pink and hairless, utterly unremarkable, a Sunday school teacher's face, and that was the most unsettling part of it. Although he was probably my dad's age or older, the slack, anonymous complexion and dead eyes made it impossible to exactly pinpoint his age. He could have been a wax statue, a young actor made up to look old, or an amateurishly embalmed corpse.
"My father is an attorney," I said. "If he knew I was here, I know he'd pay you whatever you wanted to let us go. If you just let me call him, I'm sure we can get this all worked out."
The dead-eyed man regarded me without the slightest change of expression. I could hear the links of the chain jangling softly in his hand.
He's going to hit me, I thought. Like he hit Gobi. He's going to smash my face in with the chain.
But he turned away again. It was as if he'd heard some noise from this corner of the basement but couldn't see anything there.
"Who sent you here?" he asked Gobi.
"I came on my own," Gobi said.
"Who trained you?"
Gobi said something in Lithuanian, then leaned forward and spat in his face.
The man went straight and very still. I felt myself getting ready to beg for Gobi's life. I would promise whatever I had to, to keep him from killing us.
The man just lowered the chain again. With a sigh, he wiped his face, turned, and went back upstairs.
"Hey." I looked at Gobi. "Are you okay?"
It was a stupid question, but I couldn't think of how else to open the conversation between us. I didn't even think she was going to respond. But after a moment she raised her head and looked at me. Holding my breath, I could hear her feet scraping in the wet shadows.
"I want you to listen to me very carefully, Perry." Her voice was low and intense. "Are you listening?"
"Yes."
"That man's name is Slavin."
"You actually know him?"
"Only by reputation. In a moment he's going to come back downstairs. And he's going to start torturing me."
"What do you call what he's been doing so far?"
"Nothing. Child's play."
"What's he going to do?"
"He will probably begin by ripping my fingernails out. I want you to be ready."
"For what?"
"If you see your chance to run, take it. Do not look back."
"I'm supposed to leave you getting your nails pulled out?"
"Or my teeth," she said. "They are his specialty. Rumor has it that he used to be a dentist in Romania. Now he makes a living doing interrogation for hire."
"Why don't you just tell him what he wants to know?"
"I do not like bullies. And I have never responded well to threats of force." She paused. "Also, I believe he will kill me anyway."
"Why?"
&nbs
p; "Because that is what he does."
We sat there in silence, listening to water drip from the pipes into the puddles on the floor. I wondered how badly hurt she really was, if she'd ever let on to it.
"Did you get that guy back on Eighty-Fifth Street?" I asked.
She nodded. "And then I came back out to the car. You were already unconscious. The two men were waiting for me. By the time I saw them, it was too late."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Why? There was nothing you could do."
"No," I said, "I should have been paying closer attention."
"You did the best you could," she said. "You are not a warrior, Perry, any more than I am a foreign exchange student."
The silence between us felt different now, drawing out and becoming normal, like when you're sleeping outdoors and the other person has stopped talking for a long time, and the only sounds are the noises of the world.
"Gobi—"
"I did not want to tell you any of this," she said very quietly. "But I want to tell you now. So I will tell you the rest of it."
"I saw the picture in your bag," I said. "You and the other girl. She's your sister, isn't she?"
"She was."
"What was her name?"
"Gobija."
"What?"
"She was the first Gobija."
"The one who died?"
Gobi nodded. "Five years ago she and I were backpacking through the Czech Republic together. One night she met a man at a club and went back to his hotel room. I was tired that night and stayed in." Her voice softened slightly, becoming haunted and distant with regret. "If I had just gone with her to the bar, everything might have been different. As it was, she never came back."
"What happened to her?"
"Our state police force was able to find out nothing. Through private channels I began to piece together evidence that she had been brought to America as part of a human trafficking operation. Her captors gave her large doses of heroin until she became dependent on it."
I tried to say something and couldn't.
Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick Page 10
