The Readymade Thief
Page 22
Then she saw it in Derrick’s hand, dangling between two fingers like a cigarette, the little white plastic pregnancy test.
“What is it?” Tomi asked.
“I have to go back.”
“What?”
“Just . . . I have to go back.”
“What is that?” Tomi began to zoom in on the object, and Lee swiped his hand away and closed the screen.
“Never mind what it is. If the cops find it, they will trace it to me.”
• • •
In the garage they found two nearly new bicycles that looked as though they hadn’t been ridden in many years. Tomi agreed to stand sentry outside the apartment while Lee went in and did what she had to do. It was clearly a setup, but what choice did she have? Tomi was right, Derrick’s death was probably a fake. But their end goal was clear. If they wanted to set up an exchange—With Hidden Noise for the pregnancy stick—she’d do it. The door was unlocked. When she entered, the first thing she noticed was how quiet it was. She’d never felt such silence in this apartment; it felt quieter than any abandoned building she’d ever been in.
On her way to the bathroom she saw something that she’d never seen before. Derrick’s door was open, just a crack. She stood next to it, listening, then whispered: “Derrick.” There was no response, and she pushed the door open.
She looked more closely this time at the posters and fliers and programs plastered all over the walls. All of them were Société Anonyme. It was the room of a dizzy teenager in love with a band. She left the room and headed for the bathroom.
• • •
The photo had done very little to prepare her for the reality of Derrick’s body slumped in the tub, the line of blood and brains streaked from his head up the tiles behind him. His eyes were still open, but they were no longer eyes anymore; they were sightless, occluded with a graying film. Lee pulled the shower curtain shut, then desperately wiped at it and everything else she’d touched with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, fumbling so much she nearly brought the curtain down. She had held a gun to his face a few hours ago, and Lee remembered what it had felt like to want to pull the trigger. Her stomach cramped painfully. She may as well have pulled the trigger—Derrick was now dead because of her.
Lee held her breath and opened the curtain again. The little plastic stick was still in his hand. She covered her mouth and tried not to vomit again. The last thing she needed was to leave more of her DNA behind.
She had two fingers on it and was easing it from his hand when she heard someone come in behind her. Lee collapsed forward, nearly falling onto Derrick’s body. A hand grabbed and steadied her. She heard Tomi’s voice: “Lee . . .”
Lee thrust the stick into her pocket and pushed past him. She took the stairs three at a time, feeling pressed in, sick at herself for what she’d just done—Derrick was a scumbag, but he didn’t deserve this. She wished she were in the bowels of some dark, forgotten building. She wanted to be alone.
When she burst out onto the sidewalk, the bright afternoon light wilted her. Tomi was right behind. “Lee—wait.”
She slowed despite herself, waiting without turning. He came up beside her.
“They did that to him,” she said.
“I know.”
She was feeling lightheaded again. Derrick was really dead. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about this, except in her body, which seemed to be trying to shut down. She had to keep herself from simply flopping to the sidewalk. “Jesus, I think I need to throw up.”
“Come on, let’s walk it off.”
“Walk it off? Did you see him?”
Tomi looked at the ground.
“We never liked each other, but I never . . . He was your friend.”
“Come on, we have to go. They might still be around.” They began walking. Lee kept her hoodie up and her head down. Tomi kept looking behind them.
Derrick was dead and she was alive. Was that fair? He’d been involved, apparently, but he wasn’t at the center of it, as she was. Just collateral damage. Lee wondered if they’d killed him just to send her a message. She couldn’t understand how things had gotten to this point. “How did they even get him in the shower?” she said. “Do you think he knew what was going to happen? Did you see him? His eyes . . .”
“I saw him.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“Derrick was involved with those people,” Tomi said. “Obviously he knew what they’re capable of.”
“I didn’t know they were capable of this.”
“Why would they have killed him?” Tomi said.
“To get us back out in the open.” She stopped and looked up and down the street for someone watching them. Only a couple pushing a stroller, and farther down, a man walking his dog. “They must have lost track of us, but now they’ve found us again.” Lee waited until the couple were out of earshot. “How much money do you have?”
“On me?”
“Not on you. In the world. I can get six hundred dollars.”
“What for?”
“Let’s get out of here. Out of this city.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere.”
“Okay. Yes. Finally.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure. Tonight.”
“We’ll go to the Greyhound station.”
“Lee.”
“We’ll pick a bus at random.”
“Lee. I saw you take that thing from Derrick’s hand. What was it?”
“Nothing.”
“That was a pregnancy test.”
Lee looked away.
Tomi’s confusion was naked on his face. “Is it his?”
She pulled her hoodie back up and quickened her pace back to their bicycles. When he grabbed and spun her around, he froze and stepped back, and Lee could only imagine how she must have looked to him.
“How far along are you?” Tomi looked stricken, but she could see him trying to suck it up. “I don’t care if it is his. We’ll do whatever you want. I’m still with you.”
Eyes on the ground, she thrust her hands into her pockets. “Twelve and a half weeks.”
Lee waited for him to do the math and watched this new information take root in him. “Is it mine? It’s mine, isn’t it?”
She turned away and unlocked the bikes. Lee began pedaling, in any direction, she didn’t care. He was right behind her, shouting in her ear: “We’ll raise her in the country, teach her to hunt and to farm! I’ll teach her to hack before she can talk. Why am I thinking it’s gonna be a girl? It doesn’t matter, we’ll have two, she can have a little brother to take care of. What do you think about New Hampshire? I’ve always had good feelings about New Hampshire—”
Lee stopped so suddenly Tomi was a quarter block away before he was able to adjust and turn around. He wheeled up to her. “They’ll get as big and strong as grizzly bears!”
“I’m not going to keep it.”
Tomi let go of his bike. He stumbled to the curb and collapsed. The bike lay there in the middle of the street, one wheel spinning. A car honked. Lee rolled hers to the sidewalk. “Come on,” she said. “We have to go. They could be following us right now.”
“I don’t care.”
Lee sat down next to him. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“You want to kill her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You just did.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you might. You might kill her.”
“Yes.”
“Can I feel her?”
“What?”
“Before you decide. Can I just feel her?”
“What?”
“You don’t get to be part of this.” Lee ran to her bike and pedaled off, not looking back until she was sure he wasn’t behind her.
• • •
When they arrived back at the Caldwells’, Tomi began packing immediately. Both of them knew they could no longer stay there. Lee had only her small bag, already packed and ready to go. “What now?” Tomi said.
Lee realized how deep over their heads they were. Saving Thrumm kids, past or future, was a fantasy. “Name six cities,” she said. “Anywhere. Some place where nobody knows you.”
“San Francisco. Portland. Detroit. New Orleans.” He stopped. “Are we really doing this?”
“Chicago,” she added, writing them down and numbering each. “Albuquerque.” Lee almost scratched the last one out—after all, they knew her father lived there—but then she didn’t. If fate meant for her to go there . . . She pulled the little blue bottle from around her neck and shook it, staring at the die inside. She looked at it, then the paper. They were going to Detroit.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Good urbex community there. So we go to the Greyhound station?”
Lee opened Tomi’s laptop and looked up the bus schedule to Detroit. She looked at the clock. “There’s a bus leaving in an hour, but we’ll never make it. There’s another tomorrow at noon, though. We can make that.”
They left together but split up, with an agreement to meet in two hours at a café downtown. Tomi wanted to come with her, but Lee knew that if she was being followed, she’d have an easier time losing them if she was alone. The whole way she made sure no bikes were following, and she cut through several parks and even a restaurant to lose any cars that might be on her.
• • •
Mr. Velasquez didn’t seem surprised to find Lee at his door, though she could never glean much from his expression. She thought she could see a small, dark face peering at her from behind the curtain of his kitchen window. He didn’t invite her in but headed to his shop without a word. It was cold, but she was drenched in sweat and panting, the ride having taken everything out of her. She must have looked pathetic, but he said nothing about it.
He didn’t ask where she’d been, though she’d stopped coming to see him some weeks ago. When they got into his shop, he closed the door and faced her.
“I need my money,” she told him.
“You are in trouble?”
“It’s nothing.”
He stared at her a long time before reaching behind the counter and taking out the envelope stuffed with cash. He handed it to her, and she stuffed it in her bag.
“There’s something else,” she said. She took the object, wrapped in an old dishrag, from her bag. “I need you to hold something for me.”
“And what is that?”
Lee unwrapped it on his counter, and he just stood regarding it, as though not wanting to touch it. In the dim light of the garage, it looked even older than it was, like something unearthed from the bottom of a tomb.
“Just until I figure something out.”
“It looks like the kind of thing my cousin Marco makes from trash on the street. And he’s not all there in the head.” Mr. Velasquez wrapped it back up carefully. “I suppose it must be worth something?”
“I guess it is,” Lee said, heading out to the alley.
“Wait,” he said.
Lee turned to see him holding something out to her. She took it.
It was the lighter she had stolen when she had first come under his tutelage. He had cleaned it up, and it shined coolly in her hand. He’d had it engraved on one side, LADRONCITA in elaborate gothic script, and below that, FROM VV in small block letters. Lee flicked it open and sparked it lit. The small orange flame warmed her hand, and the smell of flint and lighter fluid made her a little dizzy.
THIRTEEN
THE signage of the Heart O’ Philly Hotel had a red neon heart in place of the “O.” Tomi insisted on their best room, and the clerk seemed amused at this, obligingly charging him another twenty bucks. Lee guessed that all the rooms were exactly the same, but she didn’t say anything. Since they’d left the café, Tomi had been aggressively protective, shielding her from cars a half block away, carrying both their bags in one hand as he wrapped his other arm around her.
Lee liked this side of him; it was assertive but sweet. When the clerk asked them if they wanted a single king-sized bed or two doubles, Tomi looked at her, then at the clerk. “One bed,” he said. She took the keys from the man and headed off, leaving Tomi to take care of the rest. She didn’t feel especially safe in a hotel, had argued they’d be better off sleeping in an abandoned building, but Tomi had insisted.
The room was small and clean enough, with a big bed and a TV. Lee pulled the shades, stripped off her clothes, and stepped into the shower. She stayed there a long time, sloughing the horror of Derrick’s bathroom from her skin in a pool that swirled around her feet and into the drain. The image of his body kept flashing in her head, and she had to look directly at the light to make it go away. Lee emerged feeling somewhat human again.
Tomi was sitting cross-legged on the bed, his laptop open. On a sheet of paper was a drawing of a chessboard, just a few pieces remaining on it.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t look up. “Playing around with an idea you gave me. I found this in the room beneath the museum, in that stack of papers. It’s a copy of an announcement Duchamp did for an art exhibition in 1943. He attached a chess endgame problem to it. It’s done on translucent card stock, with the announcement on the front and the problem on the back.”
Tomi held it up for her to see, but Lee didn’t play chess, so the pieces on the board meant little to her. Below the board was written “White to Play and Win.”
“You’re trying to solve it now?” she said. “I thought we were leaving all this behind.”
“I can’t help it. And I’m not trying to solve it, exactly. Many chess players have tried their hand at it. Grand masters, even. One person designed a computer program to attempt to solve it. The consensus is that it is a problem with no solution.”
“So what are you doing?”
Tomi turned the paper over and showed her a sketch of a little cupid, upside down and seemingly plummeting, pulling back on his bow mid-fall. “It’s meant to be held to the light.” He demonstrated, holding it up against the lamp, and now she saw the cupid transposed over the board. “You can see that he’s pointing his arrow right at this pawn.”
“So is that where the solution is? With that pawn?”
“Others have thought as much, though there’s nothing in that pawn that wins the game. But I thought of something else.”
“What?”
Tomi let the paper fall back to the bed. “Duchamp’s entire lifetime of work is a lattice of connections. Each of his works refers back to prior works, embedding them and referencing them again and again.”
“And there’s a reference in here somewhere?”
“Maybe. Something you said about The Large Glass got me thinking. What if this weren’t a chess problem at all. What if it was more like . . . a map.”
“Or that you held it over a map,” she said, getting it, “and it pointed to something. But what are we supposed to hold it over?”
Tomi shook his head. “I wish I knew.”
Lee lay back on the bed, the towel wrapped around her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This time tomorrow we’ll be on a bus to Detroit with all this behind us.” Lee turned on the TV to avoid thinking about the girl upstairs.
She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when she heard Tomi click the door
shut behind him. He took a carton of chow mein and a liter of Coke from a bag and left them on the desk, then disappeared into the bathroom. Lee heard the shower go on. She didn’t wait to dive into the bag, swigging from the bottle, then holding chopsticks in a closed fist and shoveling hot noodles into her mouth.
By the time he came out of the shower, she was nearly asleep again. He climbed into the bed with her, still wet. Lee had never really been attracted to Tomi. She had liked being with him, even needed him. But he was hairy in all the wrong places, and almost as short as she was; his eyes were dewy and nervous, and his nose looked like it belonged on another face. She had felt drawn to him the first night of the museum but never since. Lee could feel Tomi’s breaths on the back of her neck, and she turned to face him. With his glasses off and in the gauzy light of the room, he actually looked handsome. His eyes, unmagnified, were intelligent and kind, and his mouth turned down willfully, as though suppressing a smile. Without the glasses, his nose looked right. Tomi had lost some weight over the last month, and Lee could see it in his cheekbones and cleft chin. More than anything she could see in his eyes how much he loved her. His breaths were falling on her mouth now, and she pulled him close and kissed him.
It was different from the night in the museum. This time was slow, fumbling and tender. Lee wasn’t sure if she loved him, but for the first time she thought that maybe she could. When they were finished, he sat up in the bed and ate chow mein from the carton and told her a story from his childhood he’d never told her before, one he said he’d never told anyone. He said he used to read books in the library while his friends played soccer in the streets. Not because he was a particularly studious kid but because he had a crush on the librarian. She was tall and blond and unsmiling, and she looked exactly like Nico from the Velvet Underground. She was also at least a dozen years older than him. He would sit at a table near the circulation desk reading books on art history, not because of his own interest but because he had gleaned that it was hers. But somewhere over the course of a year, his interest turned from her to what was in the books, and that was how he had decided he wanted to become an artist. He was telling Lee about moving to America at thirteen, about getting a paper route to pay for art supplies, when the open laptop awoke. He went to shut it down when he looked at the screen and stopped.