Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  Like most galleries, most of the time, it was empty except for the owner in a tiny, glass-walled office that was really no more than a cubicle. He gave me about forty seconds on my own with the installation closest to the window—what looked like a rag doll impaled on a tripod with a nearby video projector beaming a moving face onto its cloth head—before he couldn’t stand it any longer and came beetling over the Swedish finished maple floor, smile glued on, opening his hands and mouth, about to launch into some gushing praise of the art, and I felt reality shudder and stretch, and a stream of alternate worlds purled forth from this one, like soap bubbles when you blow through the filmy circle on the plastic wand. In one bubble world, Julia was still alive, and might be entering this gallery to talk to this man about buying the art on display for some corporate investment team. In another, she had never discovered corporate art investment and was running the place herself, and it was she who stood before me, looking me up and down, trying to judge whether I was good for the outrageous prices she was asking, tilting her head to listen, then tossing it back to swing her hair out of the way, smiling at something I said—because I would say something to make her smile, to see those indigo eyes glow and flicker like night-lights—checking my hand for a wedding ring. In yet another, we walked in together, trading a knowing look, having made a bet on how long the owner of this gallery would give us before rushing over. Then the owner spoke, and the words clapped like quick, vicious hands on every bubble until it was just a second-rate gallery in SoHo, empty of Julia.

  I have no idea what that man said to me, or I to him, but eventually he went back to his box and I closed my eyes. Years, Dornan had said. Dear god.

  Sometime later, the owner cleared his throat behind me and I realized I’d been standing, eyes closed, for a while. I walked onto the street. Rain spat cold on my face. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes. I fumbled out my phone, hit the redial button, and only had to listen to it ring three times before Karp snapped “Yes!” He must be waking up.

  The second café now had a window table vacant. I tripped in the doorway, caught my elbow on the chair sitting down, and when I tried to make sense of the menu, found I was holding it upside down. Once I had it the right way up, I ordered a lamb and leek sandwich with mesclun in balsamic vinaigrette. I tried to breathe evenly, tried to remember to watch Karp’s door, tried to remember why it was important.

  But then my sandwich came, and the act of reaching out and picking up the sturdy bread and thick meat, and lifting it to my mouth, all in logical sequence, helped the world make sense again.

  I ate the sandwich methodically, followed by every leaf on the plate, then returned to the paperback. It took forty minutes to get through the next hundred pages, forty minutes of ridiculous plot culminating in two wet-behind-the-ears lawyers scooting on skis through snow-paralyzed city streets being shot at while their boss digs with her hands like a dog in the sand at some beach house location. By two o’clock I’d finished it and was leafing through the beginning again, marveling that any editor would countenance such stuff or that so many readers would buy it. Then again, I had.

  The elevator doors opened.

  Without taking my eyes off the elevator, I put the book and a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and stood.

  “Hey, you forgot your book,” my server said. I ignored her.

  Tammy had described Karp as tall, about six-two, and the man walking north up West Broadway was six feet at most. But it was Karp. The hair was the same, reddish gold in boyish curls, as was his walk, eager and on his toes, almost bouncy, a walk much younger than his age, which Tammy had told me was late forties. The clothes were younger, too, sharply cut khakis, leather jacket, boots, shirt, saddle-stitched laptop case, the Details magazine look of a twenty-five-year-old making real money for the first time. I kept to the opposite side of the street, about thirty feet behind. We walked along at a brisk pace through streets full of that mix of tourist and resident which, along with the flowers and iron railings and small shops, reminded me of Knightsbridge.

  Every now and again he stopped and looked in a shop window to check his reflection in the glass, but he never ran his hand through the curl that fell just so over his forehead, or tugged at the waistband of his trousers to look thinner. Odd. He walked for three blocks before turning right on Prince and buying coffee from an espresso stand. His manner with the stand owner was easy and confident. They both smiled. His smile switched off abruptly as soon as he was out of the owner’s sight. Two empty cabs cruised by as he passed the mural at Prince and Greene. He walked on, sipping every now and again, avoiding pedestrians with relaxed, easy steps, frowning at a woman carrying two bags who bumped his laptop as she passed. The frown, too, was gone an instant later. Another empty cab going in his direction. He was walking all the way, then. I walked behind him, on the same side now, still thirty feet away, loose-muscled and relaxed, watching, assessing.

  When he turned onto Broadway proper, which seethed with pedestrians, I shortened the distance to fifteen feet. His boots, brown nubuck, either were brand new or lavished with extraordinary care; his jacket was still uncreased; his hair bounced gently and shone whenever the sun poured out from behind the clouds. No rings on his hands, which were strong and well manicured and quite hairless. Half a block from a large store with a checked flag hanging outside, he stopped dead on the sidewalk and just stood there. There didn’t seem to be anything to see except for the people and traffic. I stepped into the doorway of an antique shop until he nodded to himself, and walked on. I was still twenty-five feet behind him when he turned into the store with the flag. I followed him in.

  Cheap striplights, huge floor space, a jumble of racks, plain-looking signs advertising jeans, army-navy clothes, and club gear: nothing like the upscale emporiums Tammy said he usually patronized or consulted for. At any other SoHo store I would have waited by the door, but there were several levels here, and probably more than one exit. I’d have to follow him. This was not easy; I couldn’t stay in his blind spot, because I couldn’t predict where his gaze might fall. One minute he’d be walking along slowly, looking at the floor, the next he’d stop and turn and watch the tourists goggling at vinyl fetish clubwear; then he’d go stand in a corner by the sports jackets and look up at the ceiling, at the pillars with their mirrors, at the mannequins in their cargo shorts and caps. After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn’t see people as people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way, and he wouldn’t notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit. I stayed about twenty feet back and watched.

  His face while he worked was empty, removed, like that of an Olympic springboard diver as he sets his toes on the edge, spreads his arms, and begins the bouncing jump. When he stood still, his body canted slightly to the left, with his head tilted to the right in compensation. He kept his hands clasped behind him, like male members of the British royal family, and I doubted—even if he had not had to carry his laptop—that he would ever put them in his pockets. Judging by his posture and musculature, he was not a physical person; there were no laugh or frown lines on his boyish face. A man who lived in his head, or in the heads of others.

  Around me, shoppers moved in miniature flocks of four or five, doing a lot of looking and talking, in German and Japanese and Portuguese, but not much buying. No doubt Karp had been called in to remedy that.

  He spent hours inside the store, watching, listening, absorbing. I followed him from floor to floor. At some point he decided he was done: his face tightened, then curved in a practiced smile which made his eyes twinkle, and he walked purposefully to the second floor, and across to the far wall, where he talked to a woman behind a counter. She obviously did not respond as quickly as he felt was his due, because he put his bag on the counter, leaned forward, and spoke forcefully, until she picked up the phone.
Less than a minute later, a door marked PRIVATE opened, Karp shook hands with a young man wearing jeans and a hundred-dollar haircut, and they went through the door, shutting it behind them. The room was built against a sidewall; it was unlikely that it led to another exit. I settled myself behind a row of mesh T-shirts to wait.

  When he emerged half an hour later, he was still smiling, still twinkling—at least until the door closed behind him, when his face smoothed. I followed him onto the street, with its rush-hour traffic of frowning pedestrians and honking cabs, where he stepped behind a lamppost, put his laptop between his feet, and pulled out a phone. I moved closer.

  “—about, oh,” he looked at his watch, “an hour? Two? Okay, eight o’clock. Yeah, yeah, or we can order in at my place if that’s what—Sure. We can decide later.” Not a business call.

  He went back to his loft, walking briskly. This time I watched from the bar, drinking mineral water. He came out after only ten minutes, minus the laptop, wearing corduroy trousers and a sweater under his leather jacket. I followed him two blocks to Greene Street, and a restaurant and cocktail lounge paneled in dark wood, where he sat at the bar and nodded to one of the bartenders but didn’t speak. I took a table against the wall right behind him where he wouldn’t see me. A margarita appeared on the bar in front of him. He came in here a lot, then. It hadn’t been on the American Express bill. He sipped, smiled appreciatively—the same curving, twinkling smile I’d seen him assume at the store—and said something to the bartender, who laughed. The other bartender, this one a man, came over and said something. They all laughed. Lots of exaggerated head tilting, smiling, hand movements: flirting body language.

  I ordered a Heineken.

  For the next hour and a half I watched him flirt indiscriminately with men and women, couples and groups and singles, flashing out that smile, hooking them in, dismissing them after a sentence or two when it became clear he could have them if he wanted. Geordie Karp did not add up.

  The first eighteen months I worked for the Atlanta police force it was as an ordinary patrol officer. One of the most frequent calls my partner Frank and I’d get would be domestic violence. The abusers came in every size and shape and color, every background and political stripe, but the vast majority had this in common: somewhere inside, they were afraid. The bigger and louder and richer they were, the easier it was to overlook that fear, but in the habitual abuser—cases where a onetime psychosis or injury or other unusual circumstance was not to blame—it was always there. It might be fear of losing control, or of not being loved, of being ridiculed, or separated, or of being less somehow, but you could see it. Something in the way they held themselves, in the way they tried to fast-talk the officers who arrived, even, sometimes, in their misplaced pride.

  Geordie Karp did not add up as an abuser. I could see no fear in him; I could see no genuine emotion at all. Everything, the smiles, the flirting, the frowns when he had been bumped into on the street, the peremptory attitude towards the woman behind the counter in the store, was fake: gone the second he no longer needed it. Learned behavior. I went through all the things Tammy had told me: the good sex, the confusing signals—treated as an equal one minute and raped the next—and his rapid, all-too-plausible explanations. There had been no putting Tammy on a pedestal, no overly fast discussion, when they first met, of them marrying or spending their lives together—none of the classic profile pointers of abuse. Tammy had been an experiment, an amusement, one of many, most probably.

  The SoHo bar was overlaid with an image of a bar I had gone to many times with Frank. He would hitch his gun belt to a more comfortable position, order a draft and a bowl of pretzels, and expound upon the three kinds of crazy. “There’s your basic loser, some guy whose wife maybe tells him his dick’s too short so he goes on a toot and picks the wrong pansy to beat on. There’s your psychos and sickos—oh, excuse me for breathing, your sociopaths—who are screwed up from crap in their childhoods. That looniness goes way deep, they’re just fucked. And then there’s your As-Ifs, what they call borderline personality disorders, and these guys aren’t human. They look normal, but they don’t feel a goddamn thing, don’t know happy from sad from a hole in the ground. They walk around smiling and frowning and pretending to feel shit, and think everyone else out there is pretending too. No one’s real to these guys, you know what I mean? I don’t mind telling you, Torvingen, they scare the crap out of me.”

  Geordie Karp hurt people and manipulated them because they weren’t real to him. He acted as if he were human, but he was a monster.

  While I watched, he stood to greet a woman with long hair and long nails whose floor-length leather coat had what looked like solid silver buttons, to match her silver jewelry. It was plain, from the way their bodies asked before touching—a pause, a raised eyebrow, a you-first gesture—that they were almost strangers. What plans did he have for her? Would she let him? It didn’t really matter. She was young and strong and capable of walking away if she didn’t like it, as Tammy should have done. I was more interested in their plans for dinner. They ordered cocktails, then asked for menus. They examined the menus halfheartedly and I thought for a moment they might swallow their drinks and leave, go back to his loft, and get something delivered, but then the woman shrugged, and Karp nodded, and I heard them place their order: salad and entrée, and a bottle of merlot. They would be here at least another hour. I paid and left.

  Elevator locks are a more difficult breed to replace than common dead bolts, and Karp had had no reason to bother once Tammy’s key was returned to him. I slid the copied key into the lock and turned. It worked.

  On the way up, I unclipped the panel covering the light in the ceiling and looked for a camera. Nothing. When the doors opened I stepped out and sent the elevator back down.

  The loft was as I remembered—rich carpet, polished floors, and stark brick support pillars all brilliantly lit, even with no one at home—only now wherever I looked I saw that unfeeling mind at work, controlling, manipulating, hiding.

  I started in the most obvious place: the office. Karp’s laptop was out of its leather bag and connected to the printer. I turned it on, but got a password screen. Passwords take time. I could come back to it. The bag held nothing but pens, a notepad, and two cell phone batteries. No interesting papers left in the photocopier. I turned to the stacks of videotapes labeled Gateways Mall, Champaign, IL, cam. #22, 3/27/98 or Courvoisier St., Mobile, AL, cam. #07, 8/19/00. Ran a few at random. All what they purported to be. No surprise: the one I was after would be hidden somewhere more personal, like the bedroom. Nonetheless, I checked every drawer and cupboard before moving on.

  Finding the camera was easy. It was behind the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, and hooked up to a sophisticated editing deck. Sophisticated for analog. I checked camera and deck: no tape. I moved on. Nothing in the drawers, or bedside cabinets, or closets. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses. Nothing between the curtains and the blank, silvered windows. Eyes and souls and windows. Fifteen minutes gone. No tapes or camera in the linen cupboard or medicine cabinet or behind the toilet, nothing in the shower. I would have moved faster but it was not part of my plan for Karp to know anyone had been here. In the living room I peered behind books, lifted paintings from the wall, pulled aside rugs: no cutout boards, no hidden safes. The bronzes were too heavy to move; the mirrors were all one-way glass with nothing lurking beneath. On to the kitchen, where I found nothing in the freezer, or rice and flour bins, or even the garbage. Twenty-five minutes gone, and my heart was pumping easily and my breath coming smooth as cream. I stopped, and straightened, and stood by a support pillar in the center of the huge loft, thinking.

  I slid the VCR from its shelf beneath the TV in the living room and traced the cables: no satellite, cable, antenna, or computer connections. I found the electrical box in the hallway by the elevator and flipped the breakers one by one. No circuits running power to any unexplained outlets. Unless he had a camera and recorder ru
nning on battery power, there were no more recording devices hooked up. Just the tape, then. Or tapes. It seemed unlikely that there would be only one.

  According to Tammy, the loft was his private haven; no casual friends or business associates were ever invited over. So the tapes wouldn’t have to be secure, merely concealed. He probably used them in the same way he used his tapes of shoppers: to study, over and over, and learn from. They would be readily accessible. The hiding place would be obvious, if you knew what to look for.

  I closed my eyes and pictured the floor plan, placing the furniture, the lights, the rugs and art, then examined the picture slowly and methodically from every angle. Nothing unusual. I imagined the loft as a whole, its proportions, the roof with its exposed iron girders, its brick-clothed support pillars—and smiled. I laid my hands on the pillar in front of me. Why would he have covered a cast-iron support in brick when he’d left the girders exposed?

  I got a ladle from the kitchen and began banging the pillars one by one, and found the hollow one on my third try. I popped open the false front.

  There were five shelves. Only the bottom three were filled: a small, matte-black box, a slim sheaf of papers in a file folder, and two rows of tapes. Like his work tapes, these were neatly labeled: Anthony, April, Cody, Fiona … Alphabetical order. No Strange Woman Who Took Tammy Away, no Unidentified Blond Intruder. I found Tammy and took it to the office, where I turned on the video unit, put the tape in, and hesitated.

  Have you ever seen yourself having sex? You don’t look human. You are a thing … But I wouldn’t put it past Karp to have one last joke on anyone who found these tapes, and I had to be sure. I pressed PLAY.