by Sheena Kamal
“Depends on how you look at it.”
A smooth, professionally shaped brow arches. “I see. But if it was half-full, which is what I assume you’re talking about, why would you take it away?”
“My apologies,” I say with an exaggerated bow. “I wasn’t thinking.”
She stares at me with those unholy eyes and then turns back to the spectacular view. The sun is setting, bathing the mountain in front of us in a soft, golden light that is tinged pink at the edges. A bald eagle soars overhead and, with a flap of its wings, disappears from sight.
In the reflection of the glass, I see moisture leaking through the front of her blouse and suddenly the fact that she’s the only guest in the room not drinking alcohol makes sense. She’s nursing. And I remember what Bernard Lam has said about Ray Zhang. That he has a grandson.
I stand there a moment too long, riveted.
She catches someone’s eye in the reflection on the glass. A figure detaches itself from the long shadows at the corner of the room and a tall, muscular man approaches. He reminds me of the not-cops, but there is an ease with which he moves that makes me think he is far out of their league. In the glass, I see the man’s face. He is Asian, with a long jaw and full lips and his head completely shaved. It is impossible to tell his age, but I put him anywhere between a hard-lived forty and a soft fifty.
“Dao,” Jia Zhang says as the man approaches. “I’d like to show you something in a minute.”
They exchange glances over my head. Boy, do I really hate that. “Of course,” he replies, his voice quiet. All the hairs on my body bristle and a chill builds up from the soles of my feet, travels through my body, and wraps itself around my heart.
It is the voice of my nightmares, the voice that ordered the disposal of my body, the voice in the hallway of the office on Hastings Street.
Our eyes meet in the reflection of the glass. Against the backdrop of snow-covered mountains in the distance and a pristine, winter valley below us, he looks directly at me.
And he smiles.
9
I don’t know if he recognized me from that night fifteen years ago, but I don’t wait around to find out, either. I grab my things from the staff quarters and as I step outside, the cold envelops me like a frigid blanket. The lights from the chalet illuminate the access road, but gusts of snow and ice kicked up by the wind limit visibility. Carl told me that no, these conditions are not because of a storm. That’s just how it is up here. I start walking, but a noise from the building makes me look over my shoulder. Backlit from the chalet lights, a figure bundled in a heavy parka approaches, limping badly. I have no weapons on me, nothing but my pack. The ice that has gathered on the ground does neither of us any justice, though he seems to be faring better than me.
“Where the hell are you going in this weather?” Brazuca shouts. The wind carries off most of his words, but I still catch the tail end of them.
I keep walking, even though it’s difficult. I’ve forgotten how to walk in the snow, being that Vancouver hardly ever gets any. And my sprained ankle isn’t up to the task. Brazuca, however, seems as adept as an injured man could be in this environment. Big, fluffy flakes fall on the pathway to the access road and though it was salted not too long ago, they stick. Even limping, Brazuca’s got an advantage over me in this terrain, his long legs eating up the distance between us. He grabs my arm.
“Get your hand off me.”
“Only if you get your ass back inside. You gonna walk back to town? In this?” He gestures wildly at the snow-covered road.
“No, I was going to steal a car.”
“You were going to—something happened, right? Just come back inside and we’ll talk. Let me help you. Please.”
I hesitate. The wind blows the hood off my head and sends my hair flying. I’m so cold that I can’t feel my feet. Would I make it down the road in this? Brazuca holds out a mittened hand.
We don’t meet anyone on our way back to the building. Inside Brazuca’s room, I take a moment to get my bearings. There’s a queen-size bed, desk space, and a seating area with two plush armchairs. All the furnishings are done in sleek, lacquered teak and soothing blues.
Brazuca limps over to the tea station and puts some water on to boil. At places like this, you have the option of ordering tea from room service, getting tea from the dining room, or making it your damn self. Brazuca is a man after my own heart. He brews two cups of ginger tea and hands me a mug.
“So,” he says. “You going to tell me what happened to make you run out of here like the place was on fire?”
I shake my head and inhale the steam coming from the mug. “How do you know Bernard Lam?”
He closes the drapes and drops himself into an overstuffed armchair. He waves at the chair across from him and waits until I sit down to begin. “Five years ago, there were shots fired outside of a nightclub and a woman died. Bernard was there. He was one of the witnesses we questioned. His car got hit, so we thought he had something to do with it. Nothing came of it when we questioned him, but the next week we followed him to another event and more shots were fired.”
“Five years ago?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Hmm.” I glance at his bad leg.
I see a flash of white teeth as he smiles to himself. “You got that, did you? I pushed him to the ground and got shot in the process.”
Ah, so that’s his big story. Now I understand. Bernard Lam gave him access to this chalet because he owes Brazuca his life. It’s as good a reason as any. “Why was someone trying to kill him?”
“We still don’t know. He hired a private security firm for personal protection after that but no further attempts were made on his life and we’re still not sure about the motivations of the attacks. But I’ve looked into it every now and then.”
We sip our tea quietly.
“So,” Brazuca says. “What made you run out of here like that?”
A woman is entitled to her secrets. She should be able to hide them away for as long as she wants, without people constantly prying, trying to take a peek inside her head. But secrets are exhausting and that’s the plain truth of the thing. The effort of keeping them locked away, shielding them from view . . . I’m only human, after all. I look away from him, though, because it is the only way I can do this.
“That night . . . the man who ordered me to be dumped in the woods, he’s here. It’s Dao. Jia Zhang’s private security.”
Brazuca stills. “Was he the one who—”
“No. But he works for him. I’m sure of it.”
Brazuca leans forward. He knows better than to try to touch me, but by reducing the physical distance between us and lowering his voice to just above a whisper, he has succeeded in creating as intimate a conversation as we could possibly have. “Was it Ray Zhang that night?” he asks, in a surprisingly gentle voice. A detective’s voice when questioning someone fragile. He doesn’t need to bother. If I was going to break down, it wouldn’t be here or now. It would be much later, alone at the side of the road with a bottle of vodka in one fist and whatever blunt weapon happened to be handy in the other.
I shake my head. “No. Not if Ray Zhang is the man in that photo I showed to Lam. But he was Asian. I remember that much. And younger, maybe even younger than me. I had a singing gig at one of the basement bars in the city. A real dive, but the drinks were never watered down, so it saw a lot of action on Saturday night. Still not the kind of place that would attract the likes of Ray Zhang. I sang and then had a few drinks and then didn’t wake up for months afterward. I was talking to someone, but he was younger, even then.”
“But you don’t know who else was there after you blacked out.”
I shake my head and sip my tea. The warmth of it spreads down my throat and to my belly. Brazuca is silent for a moment.
He puts down the mug and steeples his fingers. “Nora . . . I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“I don’t even remember it. Sometimes I get f
lashes. Voices, faces, but no one that I could identify until tonight.”
“So you were assaulted that night by someone connected to Zhang and then fifteen years later the child that you bore as a result goes missing. Why would they take her? Why now?”
There’s something that has been bothering me but I can’t quite place my finger on it yet. “A journalist named Mike Starling found me out in the woods. He was hiking with a few buddies and they stumbled on my body. He took me to the hospital and then reported on the story. His editor liked the personal connection and made him dig deeper for a larger series. He knew my story, but never revealed my identity—as far as I know. Several years ago he hooked me up with Seb Crow and then I never heard from him until after Bonnie went missing. He wanted to meet with me, but when I finally agreed he didn’t show up . . . but some WIN Security men did. I dodged them but there’s only one way they could know about our meeting.”
“Okay . . . so they got to Starling. Someone must have connected you to him from the articles.”
“Right. And when I went to Starling’s apartment, he was dead. Bled out in his bathtub.”
“Jesus.”
I tell him about the storage locker, the stem cell research, and Syntamar.
Brazuca stands and begins to pace. “What does that have to do with Bonnie?”
“Stem cells harvested from umbilical cords have been used to treat certain diseases since the eighties.” I learned that from Starling’s research.
“You think they stole your cord blood?”
“I don’t know. How would that happen?”
He shakes his head. “No clue. But that blood is what links you two. You’re connected to Dao from that night. Dao is connected to Zhang, who works with WIN. WIN just so happens to be looking for Bonnie. And then when you broke into WIN, Dao is the one sent to your office. And someone murders Starling to get to you because they realized that you were the one Starling was writing about and that he knew you. That’s why he was targeted. They’re looking for you now.”
“But Starling made a point of mentioning in his articles that my memory of that night was gone.”
“Still, they knew about it. I think that they must have contacted Starling somehow and he traced them back to Zhang. That’s why he had a picture of Zhang with the Syntamar board. He must have been looking into this for quite a while.”
“But what does any of this have to do with Bonnie?”
“I don’t know. She’s really the key to all this.” Brazuca rubs at his eyes. The hot ginger tea after being outside in the cold has left us both warm and sleepy.
I look at the luxurious bed, which is big enough for three people. And even peons at this chateau get fine sheets worthy of, if not a prince, then certainly one of his advisors. “I’ll take the floor.”
“No, dammit. I’m the man here.” He says this with surprising heat. I look over at him. His brows are knit together and a flush creeps up over his collar. I’ve never seen him this flustered.
“So? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“So, I’ll sleep on the damn floor and you, the woman, can sleep on the bed. For fuck’s sake, Nora.”
“But you’re a cripple,” I point out. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
He sighs. “Chivalry is dead. Fine, I’ll take the bed.” He limps over to the bed, tosses me the comforter and a pillow, and sits on the edge. I don’t watch as he removes his shoes and his belt. He stretches out with his eyes closed while I make a bed on the floor.
10
We lie in silence for a while, separated mostly by altitude. The light is still on in the room, but neither of us makes a move to turn it off. It’s sometime after midnight, but there are no clocks in the room so I can’t place the hour exactly. I’m not sure why, but I’m unsettled. Though I’m exhausted and this comforter is the coziest piece of fabric I’ve ever encountered, I still can’t seem to close my eyes. I know Brazuca is awake, too, because of his uneven breathing.
Finally he gives up the pretense of sleep. “Nora, you up?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve both had a rough couple of days and I just want you to know . . . If you need someone tonight, well, you can have me. Just putting it out there since you’re too much of a coward to make the first move.”
For a moment, I forget to breathe. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what. You’re not comfortable around men for obvious reasons but we both know you’re attracted to me. So if you need me, I’m here.”
“What makes you think that I’m attracted to you?” When could I have possibly given him that impression? Maybe he thinks assaulting him in a bathroom with a blow to the back of the head is some kind of come-on.
“I don’t know,” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice. “Could be because you’re always staring at me when you think I’m not looking.”
“I do that to everyone.”
“Do you stare at everyone’s mouth, though?”
Have I been doing that? Possibly. Probably. It makes me mad that, first of all, now that I think about it I have paid close attention to his dental hygiene and, second, he noticed. “Fuck you.”
He yawns. “If you want. If not, I’m going to sleep. But you should know that I may not be around forever, and the rate you’re going, looks like you’re in the same boat. Besides, you hit me with a tire iron and we all know what that means.” He has remained still throughout the conversation and now turns his face toward me and gives me a beatific smile before closing his eyes again.
For some reason, I don’t quite know what to do with my hands. They have shucked off the covers and are wringing themselves nervously. I go into the bathroom before I do anything rash. In the shower, I scrub myself until I’m raw with luxury hotel soap that smells like roses and try to summon those feelings of fear and shame that have kept me celibate for so very long, but either they have subsided over the years or something has shifted inside me. All that’s left is a curiosity that I can’t suppress.
I stand in the doorway, wrapped in a towel, and stare at Brazuca on the bed. He’s now on his back, his hands resting beneath his head. But I can tell from his uneven breathing that he is not asleep. “Why would you do this for me?” I say finally.
“Does it really matter?”
“Yes.”
“Because I want to.” Even though his eyes are closed and I can’t read what’s behind them, something in his voice indicates to me that he’s telling the truth.
“And do I have to . . .”
“No. Just come here.”
I turn off all the lights except for the one in the bathroom and grab his belt and a tie from the curtains. He opens his eyes as I straddle his chest and tie his wrists to the bedposts. He doesn’t resist. “Take off the towel or you’ll smother me,” he says softly.
I pause. I haven’t been naked in front of someone in years, more than a decade, but he makes a good point.
As if he’s read my mind, he closes his eyes again. I look down at his calm face and think about kissing him. A deep breath and the towel is cast aside. I lean down. My mouth hovers just over his, our breath intermingling for several seconds before it becomes too much to bear. I sit up and position my knees on either side of his face and for a moment he just breathes me in before I feel his tongue.
I want to hate it, but I don’t. It feels too good to be real.
It’s over almost as soon as it started and the whole thing has taken me by surprise. This time the aftermath of orgasm doesn’t come from shame. My body doesn’t break out into a cold sweat. I come down and, even with my hands wrapped around the bed frame for support, I’m free falling.
Brazuca doesn’t ask for reciprocation and I don’t offer. I’m not sure I would be any good at it anyway. I’ve never claimed to be a decent lover, not even before the red sheet. I lie on my side with my face turned away from him and wait for my heartbeat to slow down. He disengages his own wrists and disappears into the bathroom. I wonder bri
efly if he has done this out of desire or altruism, but in the end it doesn’t matter.
I slip out of the bed and am buried under my comforter on the floor by the time he returns to the room. My clothes are back on and the towel is hanging off the foot of the bed.
We lie in the dark again for some time, both awake. The air between us is awkward but not unpleasant, given what has just transpired. My first partner-assisted orgasm in more than a decade. Well, a partner that’s not an inanimate object.
“I bet that cognac was amazing,” I say, because it has been on my mind.
“Liquid gold,” Brazuca agrees from the bed. He turns to face me.
I don’t look at him. “Too bad we don’t have any self-control.”
“Speak for yourself,” he says in a thick voice. “I have lots.”
“Says the alcoholic.”
“See, now, that’s just the pot calling the kettle a kitchen instrument. I’ll have you know, my self-control is legendary.”
I think about that for a while. Eventually a heavy sleep anchors me to the ground and when I wake up, Brazuca is gone and I’m grateful. Is there any person alive who is good with intimacy?
11
Sometimes I feel a huge weight crushing down on me and at other times I think it’s just my imagination. Could be as simple as a bout of depression, but when I really think about it there’s nothing in my life to be depressed about. I’m alive, I’ve laid off the booze far longer than I ever thought I could, I have a dog to walk the streets with at night and to ignore me during the day as if she were a cat, and I’m steadily employed by people who don’t ask too many questions and apparently don’t mind me camping in their basement. It’s a better life than some.
So why then does this crushing feeling come back?
