I tried to stand, but the long grass had wrapped itself around me and tied me, and then he was running the lawn mower over me again. He adored me, why was he tormenting me like this?
“Papa, stop!” I screamed again. He halted briefly, and I tried to sit up. My hands were tied behind me. I rubbed my face against my shoulder, trying to push up the bandages on my eyes. I couldn’t budge them, and I kept rubbing, until I realized that I was rubbing my eyes. I wasn’t bandaged; I was in a black space, so dark I couldn’t even see the gleam of my parka.
I heard a roar, felt a horrible jerk, and then the mower rolled over me again, knocking the breath out of me, so I couldn’t scream. My mind shrank to a pinprick in its retreat from pain. Another halt, and this time I forced myself to think.
I was in a truck. I was in the back of a semi, and something on wheels was rolling back and forth with the jolting of the truck. I remembered Marcena, with the skin missing from a quarter of her body, and tried to shift myself, but the motion of the truck and the assaults from the handcart, or conveyor belt, or whatever it was, made it impossible for me to move.
My hands were tied behind me and my legs were strapped together. I smelled, too, smelled the way Freddy Pacheco did when I attacked him. A hundred years ago, that had been. The vomit and blood and pee, they were all mine. My head ached, and blood had dried in my nose. I needed water desperately. I stuck my tongue up and licked the blood. AB negative, a good vintage, hard to find, don’t lose too much of it.
I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to be back in my other world, where my father was with me, even if he was hurting me. I wanted my mother on the other side of the door, making cocoa for me.
The detective who feels sorry for herself might as well write her own funeral oration. The next time the truck halted, I made a ferocious effort and sat up. I twisted so my feet were at right angles to where they’d been. Now I was leaning with my back against the back of the truck. The next time the wheeled thing came at me, it rammed into the soles of my boots. I felt the jolt all the way up my spine. No good, V. I., no good, a few more hits like that and you’ll be paralyzed.
We stopped again. Wherever we were going, we were on city streets, I guessed, with a lot of stop signs, and my captors were obeying traffic laws-they weren’t going to risk ticketing for running a red light.
I fell forward onto my knees and managed to move them, just a little, just enough to crawl forward until I ran into the wheeled thing. The top was about thigh high, and I flung myself onto it as the truck rocked forward again.
It felt like a victory, a triumph as big as scaling Everest. Yes, I was Junko Tabei; what she’d done, scaling the big mountain, didn’t compare with this scrabbling with bound hands and feet on top of something I couldn’t see. I lay across the wheeled thing, my head throbbing, but the pleasure of getting away from the rollers kept me from losing consciousness again.
We made an abrupt hard turn and the truck bounced. The trailer went up and down on its eighteen wheels and then rocked from side to side. I rolled helplessly up and down with the cart, slamming crazily from one end of the truck to the other, trying to hold my head so it wouldn’t bang up and down with the motion.
I knew where we were going. The knocked-over fence, the track through the marsh, I could picture our route, the gray sky and grass and the end, the end in a pit. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the darkness, not wanting to see the end.
When we halted, I lay on my face panting shallowly, feeling the motor rumbling underneath me, too exhausted to brace myself against the next jolt forward. I heard a crash to my right and slowly moved my head to look. The doors to the truck swung open and I was dazzled by light. I thought it was daytime, thought it was the sun, thought I’d go blind.
Grobian strode along the back of the truck. Close your eyes, V. I.; blunk them up: you’re unconscious, the eyes blunk up when you’re unconscious. Grobian thrust a lid up with a rough thumb; he seemed satisfied. He grabbed me around the waist and slung me over his shoulder and thumped back out. I opened my eyes again. It was still night-being locked in total blackness had made even the night sky look bright at first.
“This time we’re in the right spot,” Grobian said. “Jeesh-suburban prick like you, dumping Czernin and the Love woman on the golf course instead of the landfill. This Polish cunt will be under ten feet of garbage by the time the sun comes up.”
“You don’t talk to me like that, Grobian,” Mr. William said.
“Bysen, from now on I talk to you however I please. I want that job in Singapore, running the Asian operations for By-Smart, but I’d consider South America. One of those or I’m talking to the old man. If Buffalo Bill finds out what you’ve been up to with his precious company-”
“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral,” William said. “I’m not worried about anything you say to him.”
“Big talk, big talk, Bysen. But if you acted as big as you talk-you’d never have gotten involved in crap like this. Men like your father, if they can’t do their dirty work themselves they’re smart enough to have friends of friends of friends figure it out so no finger ever points to them. You want to know why Buffalo Bill won’t trust you with more of his company? Not because you’re a lying, cheating SOB-he respects lying, cheating SOBs. It’s because you’re a lying, useless weasel, Bysen. If you hadn’t been Buffalo Bill’s son, you’d be lucky to have a job typing figures in your own warehouse.”
Grobian swung me like a hammock and flung me from him. I landed facedown in muck. I heard him dust his hands and then heard him and William head back to the truck, bickering the whole way, not looking back at me, not even talking about me.
I lifted my head just as the truck jerked into gear again. The headlights flooded me for a moment, showing me where I was, the side of one of the giant mounds of earth where Chicago buries its trash. Beyond the By-Smart semi, I could see lights from other trucks, city trucks, a line of beetles moving toward me. Every day, another ten thousand tons comes in, gets emptied, and covered again with more dirt. The city trucks work round the clock, hauling away our refuse.
My stomach was frozen from fear. Grobian was backing the By-Smart semi, starting to turn it in a wide, clumsy circle. When he got out of the way, the line of beetles would crawl on up the hillside and dump their loads on me. I frantically pushed my left foot against my right, bending my toes inside my boot, bracing myself by putting my head into the sludge. I couldn’t waste time watching the semi’s progress. I pushed so hard I screamed from the pain shooting up my spine.
My right foot came out of my running shoe. I pulled my foot free of the fabric tying my legs together. Drew my knees under me and pushed myself standing. I was free, I could jump up and down, the drivers would see me. My thighs wobbled with fatigue, my arms were pinned behind me so that my shoulders felt they might burst in their sockets, but I wanted to sing and dance and turn cartwheels.
The garbage trucks weren’t on me yet: the By-Smart semi was still blocking the track, lurching in a circle. I stopped jumping. Save your energy, Warshawski, save it for when you need it. The semi kept turning, not straightening out for the outbound road. The line of beetles had stopped and was honking at the semi. It seemed as though Grobian had forgotten how to drive. Or was William trying to prove he wasn’t a completely useless weasel by taking the wheel himself? The tractor made too wide a turn and brought the trailer over the side of the hill. The trailer teetered for a minute on its inside wheels and toppled over. The tractor fell back on its hind wheels, hung for a second, and then collapsed on its side.
46 Behold: The Purloined Pen
The night ended for me as far too many had already this month: in a hospital emergency room, with Conrad Rawlings staring down at me.
“Whatever you have for breakfast, Ms. W., I want to start eating it, too: you should be dead.”
I blinked at him hazily through the curtain of pain blockers shrouding my mind. “Conrad? How di
d you get here?”
“You made the ER nurse call me. Don’t you remember? You apparently had ten kinds of fits when they tried to put you under, that I had to get here before you’d let them treat you.”
I shook my head, trying to remember the shreds of the night behind me, but the movement hurt my head. I put a hand up to touch it and felt a sheet of adhesive.
“I don’t remember. And what’s wrong with me? What’s on my head?”
He grinned, his gold tooth glinting in the overhead lights. “Ms. W., you look like the lead zombie from the Night of the Living Dead. Someone shot you in the head, which, if I thought it would pound any sense into it, I can only applaud.”
“Oh. In the warehouse, right before he knocked me out. Grobian shot me. I didn’t feel it, just the blood pouring down my face. Where is he? Where’s William Bysen?”
“We sort of have them, although the Bysen legal machine is moving into action, so I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep them. When I got here, they were trying a story out on the cop on duty in the emergency room, that you had hijacked one of the By-Smart semis and they’d fought you for it, which is how the truck got knocked over. The fire department crew that brought the three of you in objected that your hands and feet were tied, and Grobian said they’d done that to keep you from overpowering them. Want to comment?”
I shut my eyes; the glare from the overhead light hurt too much. “We live in a world where people seem willing to believe almost any lie they’re told, no matter how ludicrous, as long as someone with family values is telling it. The Bysens prattle so much about family values, I suppose they can get the state’s attorney and a judge to believe this one.”
“Hey, Ms. W., don’t be so cynical: you’ve got me on the case now. And the city garbagemen have some evidence that the Bysen story doesn’t exactly explain.”
I smiled at him in a muzzy, dopey way. “That’s nice, Conrad, thanks.”
The pain blockers kept carrying me off on their tide, but on my rides to the surface I told him about Billy and Josie, and as much as I could remember of my night at the warehouse, and he told me about my rescue.
Apparently, when the semi toppled over at the landfill, the city crews had sprung from their trucks and raced to the accident scene-as much voyeurs as Good Samaritans. It was then that one of them had caught sight of me, feebly flopping about the hillside. They’d called for help, and gotten a fire truck but no ambulance, so after the firemen freed Grobian and William from the tractor the three of us rode a hook and ladder together to the hospital.
I sort of remembered that; the pain from bouncing up Stony Island Avenue at top speed in a fire truck had woken me, and I had a dream-dazed memory of Grobian and William shouting at each other, blaming each other for the mess they were in. I guess it was only when they got to the hospital, and had to give a story to the police, that they’d decided to join forces and blame me for their mess.
I tried to stay awake enough to follow Conrad’s story, but behind the pain meds my shoulders throbbed from being pulled from their sockets. My kidneys ached, my whole body, from head to toe, was one pulsing sore; after a while, I just let go of it all and went to sleep.
When I woke again, Conrad had left, but Lotty was there, along with Morrell. The hospital wanted to discharge me, and Lotty was taking me home with her.
“It’s criminal to move you now, and I said so to the director, but their managed care owners decree how much care a battered body gets, and yours gets twelve hours.” Lotty’s black eyes flashed-I realized that she was only partly indignant on my behalf-she was furious that a hospital could pay more attention to their owners than to an important surgeon.
After his own recent injuries, Morrell knew what to bring for the battered body to wear home. He’d stopped at a fancy Oak Street boutique and bought me a warm-up suit made of a cashmere so soft it felt like kitten fur. He’d bought fleece-lined boots so I wouldn’t have to deal with shoes and socks. As I dressed in a wobbly, lethargic way, I saw that my skin looked like an eggplant harvest, more purple than olive. On our way out, the nurse gave me a bag with my slime-crusted clothes. I was even more grateful to Morrell for keeping me from having to look at them this morning.
Morrell helped me into a wheelchair, and laid his cane in my lap so he could push me down the hall. Lotty walked alongside like a terrier, her fur bristling when she had to speak to someone on the staff about my discharge.
Not even my injuries could keep Lotty from treating the city streets like the course of the Grand Prix, but I was too dopey to worry about her near miss with a truck at Seventy-first Street.
Morrell rode with us as far as her apartment: he would take a cab back to Evanston from there. In the elevator going up, he said that the British Foreign Office had finally located Marcena’s parents in India; they were flying into Chicago tonight, and would be staying with him.
“That’s nice,” I said, trying to summon the energy to be interested. “What about Don?”
“He’s moving to the living room couch, but he’ll go back to New York on Sunday.” He traced a finger along the line of my head bandage. “Can you stay out of the wars for a few days, Hippolyte? Marcena is having her first skin graft on Monday; it would be nice not to have to worry about you as well.”
“Victoria is not going anywhere,” Lotty pronounced. “I’m ordering the doorman to carry her back upstairs to bed if he sees her in the lobby.”
I laughed weakly, but I was fretting about Billy and Josie. Morrell asked if I would feel better if they went to stay with Mr. Contreras. “He’s aching to do something, and if he had them to fuss over, it would help him not mind so much that you’re staying here with Lotty.”
“I don’t know if he can keep them safe,” I worried.
“For this weekend, Grobian, at any rate, will still be in custody. By Monday, believe it or not, you’ll feel a lot stronger, and you’ll be able to figure out a better plan.”
I had to agree: I didn’t have the strength to do anything else right now. I even had to agree to let Morrell send Amy Blount down to Mary Ann’s to collect the runaway pair; I hated not looking after them myself, hated Morrell for adding I couldn’t manage the world all by myself, so to stop trying.
I slept the rest of the day away. When I woke in the evening, Lotty brought me a bowl of her homemade lentil soup. I lay in her guest room, luxuriating in the clean room, the clean clothes, the peace of her loving care.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she showed me Marcena’s red recording pen. “I took your foul clothes to the laundry, my dear, and found this inside. I assumed you want to keep it?”
I couldn’t believe it had still been on my body after all I’d gone through-or that Bysen and Grobian hadn’t found it when they had me unconscious and in their power. I snatched it from her. “My God, yes, I want this.”
47 Office Party
“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral.”
William’s thin fussy voice hung like a smear of soot in my office. Buffalo Bill’s full cheeks were sunken. His eyes under their heavy brows were pale, watery, the uncertain eyes of a feeble old man, not the fierce eagle stare of the corporate dictator.
“You hear that, May Irene? He wants me dead? My own son wants me dead?”
His wife leaned across my coffee table to pat his hand. “We were too hard on him, Bill. He never could be as tough as you wanted him to be.”
“I was too hard on him, so that means it’s all right that he wants me dead?” His astonishment brought some of the color back into his face. “Since when did you sign up for that liberal swill, spare the rod, spoil the child?”
“I don’t think Mrs. Bysen meant that,” Mildred murmured.
“Mildred, for once, you let me speak for myself. Don’t go interpreting me to my own husband, for heaven’s sake. We’ve all heard the tape that Ms. Warshawski played; I think we can agree it’s a sad chapter in our family life, but we are a family,
we are strong, we will move past this. Linus has kept it out of the papers, bless him”-she directed a grateful look at the corporate counsel, sitting in one of the side chairs-“and I’m sure he’ll help us work out an arrangement with Ms. Warshawski here.”
I leaned back in my armchair. I was still tired, still sore around the arm sockets from having my arms lashed behind me for two hours. I had a couple of broken ribs, and my body still looked like a field of ripe eggplants, but I felt wonderful-clean, newborn, that euphoric sense you get when you know you’re truly alive.
By the time Lotty came on the little recording pen, its battery was dead. She wouldn’t let me leave her place to get a charger, but when I explained why I was so desperate to listen to it she relented enough to let Amy Blount bring my laptop over. When I hooked it up to my iBook, it sprang obediently to life and spilled its digital guts for me.
Thursday night at the warehouse, there had actually still been enough juice in it that it had recorded William, Grobian, and Jacqui. Grobian’s shot at me echoed horrifyingly through Lotty’s living room, followed by a satisfied exclamation from William that I hadn’t heard at the time. The pen had died on the way from the landfill to the hospital; it only gave me part of Grobian’s and William’s quarrel, but I got enough of Grobian’s highly colored language that I could really grow my vocabulary if I replayed it a few times.
After we downloaded it to my Mac, I asked Amy to make about thirty copies: I wanted to ensure they were spread far and wide, so that even the best efforts of Linus Rankin, or the Carnifice detectives, couldn’t eliminate them all. I sent a bunch to my own lawyer, Freeman Carter, put some in my office safe, sent one to Conrad and another to a senior police officer who was a friend of my dad’s, and, after debating it up and down with Amy and Morrell, finally sent one to Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star. Murray was madly trying to persuade his bosses to let him go up against the Bysen money and power; whether they’d ever let him dig into the story was still up in the air.
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