“Murder?” I asked, careful to sound surprised and properly horrified.
“Stabbed to death and dumped into the river. You wouldn’t like to make it easier for all of us with a quick confession, would you?”
“But I didn’t do it!”
“Of course you didn’t,” he soothed. “You’re a seducer and purse snatcher. Anyone who knows you would agree that you haven’t got the guts to kill anyone, and certainly not with a knife. That isn’t the point. The point is what I can prove.”
“But I have witnesses who will swear I was in Prague!”
“And I have witnesses who will swear you were in Budapest. I’m sure I can talk to the border officials and convince one of them that he remembers stamping your passport on any date I wish to name. Without your original passport, how can you prove he lies?”
Though my witnesses were as fictitious as my innocence, I felt a moral outrage that he would stoop to similar invention, and sputtered, “But you can’t just make things up!”
“The lucky thing is, with a case like this, I can get the coroner to swear that death occurred any time I want. A body in the water, the rate of decomposition depends on a number of factors, such as temperature, drift, and so on. Even with your witnesses, who frankly our judges won’t be so likely to believe, I can create a time line to hang you.”
For the first time in my life, it occurred to me I might be in serious trouble. The film financing schemes, the games of amorous larceny I’d played with young women, and the mugging of Zdeněk had all produced uncomfortable moments, but nothing beyond the powers of extrication. If Bortnyk bothered to check, he could find ample evidence that I’d been in Budapest at the time of Sven’s murder. Credit card records and a hotel registration form to start. Then the hotel maid would remember finding me passed out on the floor, and the manager would testify to my odd behavior. With real evidence at hand, Bortnyk could turn his perjuring talents to the manufacture of eyewitnesses and murder weapon. I had no friends in Budapest, and even if my family rose to my defense the most it could accomplish would be a phone call from a U.S. Senator. It galled me to be framed for a murder I in fact committed.
“Please,” I begged, “can’t you see I’ve suffered enough?”
“No,” he flatly answered.
“Not even you could hate me so much.”
“But I do,” he insisted.
“Look, I’m really sorry, but I didn’t know she was, you know, your fiancée. Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit unreasonable?”
“Jail will come first, and your beating from the Arabs will seem like foreplay compared to what the guards will give you. I might even be able to arrange a psychotic sodomite as your cell mate. Then the trial, the death sentence, the months of waiting, filled with beatings and other small pleasures. And I’ll be with you every day, every step of the way. Because, Mr. Miller, revenge never should be reasonable.”
I quaked and gnashed my teeth. Lucifer could not have terrified me more. “My family is rich,” I confided. “Filthy rich. Name a sum and they’ll pay it.”
The offer gave his malice pause. I imagined the call I would make to Father, begging his forgiveness. I’d offer to wash cars at the family dealership for a year. I’d promise to don suit and tie and attend sales training seminars. I would allow them to plant inspirational can-do messages in my parched soul. Father would be moved by my humility and quote some obscure biblical passage about the return of the prodigal son. At the end, we’d be shedding tears of filial and paternal joy.
“Just say the word and I’ll arrange to have a car shipped to you tomorrow,” I offered. “Any color you want. Or cash. I’ll have the funds wired direct to your account from my bank in L.A.”
Bortnyk smiled with what I imagined was avaricious glee. “On the other hand,” he said, “I’m not inhuman. I want revenge but I’m not a monster. To begin, it’s plain you need a doctor. Are you in much pain?”
Every breath lacerated. “Excruciating pain,” I said.
“Stand up. Let me take a look at you,” he commanded.
I took his offered hand and inwardly rejoiced at the power of money to transform and unite all to a common interest. He probed the cut above my swollen eye, the abrasions on my cheek, my split lip and bruised jaw. “I’m not a doctor but I’ve seen enough beatings to know what to look for,” he bragged. I winced and grunted when he pressed on my rib cage. He turned me around and probed the muscles and inner organs at the lower back. “There’s no swelling or sign of damage here,” he observed. “Didn’t they work you over in this area at all?”
My kidneys were thankfully free of pain. “I’m lucky,” I joked. “Seems like they missed at least one part of my body.”
“Fucking amateurs,” he said. “If you really want to hurt someone, that’s the best place to do it.”
The first blow cut my spinal cord in half and blasted a rocket of red light through my skull. When my knees buckled he pulled me up by the hair and held me face first against the wall. I squirmed and thrashed but he was bigger, stronger, and expert at that type of beating. He pinned me with a forearm to my neck and drove his fist into one kidney and then the other with a force that shook the wall. With each blow I shuddered as though he reached into my guts and ripped me apart from the inside out. The final blow burst my brain like a blown-out bulb.
“Don’t try to leave the hotel,” I heard a distant voice say. “Someone will be posted in the lobby, someone else on the street outside.” Then, as a measured afterthought, the voice said, “Have a nice day.”
The smell of smoke revived me like salts. I rolled onto my back. Monika sat against the far wall, arms curled around knees, smoking a cigarette.
“Thank God you’re back,” I groaned.
She knocked the ash from the tip, took a drag, and said nothing.
“I feel like I’m dying.” I confessed.
She glanced down at her feet—she wore a T-shirt and jeans but no shoes—and wedged the cigarette into a corner of her lips to pick at something between her toes. Never before had I seen her dressed so casually. Ribs and kidneys fiercely resisted my attempts to stand. I pushed to hands and knees and crawled into the bathroom. She had not seemed to recognize that I had been in the room. Like most actresses, she was not of a naturally stable temperament, and the death of the taxi driver the previous night had partially unhinged her. The news of Sven’s death might have delivered such a severe blow to her psyche that the lid had come all the way off.
The sight of my face in the mirror staggered and disoriented me; the beating had reorganized my features into an unfamiliar terrain of lumps, bumps, and gashes. The oblongish sphere that rested above my torn and bloody shirt bore as much resemblance to the original as Frankenstein’s did his. I clawed open Monika’s bathroom kit—a bangled new Versace model—and amid the jumble of cosmetics plucked a bottle of acetaminophen, which I joyfully discovered was laced with codeine. The manufacturer recommended two. I took six.
A cool shower stripped my skin of sweat. The water pleasantly stung my open wounds and dulled the pain of the closed ones. When I stooped to examine the subcutaneous purples and blacks that mottled me from ankle to neck, pain thundered from my lower back and nearly brought me to my knees. Bortnyk had been right: Kidneys were the best place to hurt someone. In the sink, I opened the tap until the water ran cold and clear. I soaked two towels and hobbled into the bedroom, where, reclined against stacked pillows, I draped one towel around my swollen ankle and applied the second as a cold compress over my left eye and jaw.
When Monika entered the room, accompanied by ashtray and cigarettes, I said, “I heard about Sven. I’m sorry.” I didn’t rue killing him, but regretted her discovery of his death. She sat on the floor across from the bed, lit another cigarette, hugged her knees to her chest, and smoked.
“That Hungarian cop told me. He found me lying on the floor, just after the Gypsies beat me half to death. It’s lucky I’m still alive.”
Alt
hough my vision was skewed to one good eye and I couldn’t be certain of what I saw, she seemed to watch me with an inhuman coldness. I felt like a wounded animal, stalked by jackal or wolf, which patiently waits just beyond striking range. I discounted my unease as paranoia. “I know how much he meant to you,” I said. I needed to be sensitive and caring. A time of crisis just might draw us closer together. I remembered the voice of Dr. Quellenbee, soothing me while I stewed on his couch in silent fury, and tried to reach the same compassionate pitch. “There’s so much about the two of you I don’t understand. I know you were brother and sister. You don’t have to say anything, but if you want to talk, I’ll listen. Sometimes, it’s not healthy to hold these things in.”
She said nothing. She smoked and watched me. Her green eyes had always seemed exotic and not quite human. Now they looked bestial. Her silence offended me. I had been thrashed by a vicious gang of Gypsies, beaten by a psychotic Hungarian cop; I lay bloodied and broken, crippled in one leg and unable to draw full breath. Not one word of sympathy, not a compassionate glance or merciful expression of concern. She looked at me as though I might be a lump of meat waiting to be cut up, chewed down, and shat out the other end.
“Only a couple of bones broken, thank you, some damaged organs and internal bleeding, but other than that, I’m perfectly fine,” I burst out, finally unwilling to fence my resentment.
She stubbed out one cigarette, thumbed the flint on her lighter, and lit another. Had I the strength, I would have smashed a chair over her head.
“I’m hurt,” I pleaded. “I think I’m hurt really bad. I need you to help me. I need you to at least talk to me. Please, just say something.”
She inhaled smoke, exhaled smoke, tapped the tip of her cigarette against the glass rim of the ashtray, said nothing. When I first noticed my body trembling I thought I had succumbed to the first stage of shock, and only after I shouted, “You’re a monster. A bloody, brother-fucking monster!” did I recognize it as rage.
It was like I jabbed a stick at her. She recoiled and stared at me, bluntly murderous. She said, “You killed him, didn’t you?”
Though I anticipated her suspicions I had not foreseen a direct accusation, and stared at her amazed she would say such a thing. We had lived together the past few weeks, if not in complete bliss at least with an intimacy that should have tempered her accusation with a modicum of doubt. A dozen protestations and denials vied for simultaneous expression and twisted my tongue into a useless, sputtering appendage.
“I should have guessed it earlier.” Her voice was flat, unemotional. “He disappears, and you show up a day or two later. You seemed so confident that I’d go along. You couldn’t be that confident unless you knew he was out of the way. But who would have thought a runt like you could kill a man like Sven?”
I told myself she didn’t mean the accusation, she had no evidence, she tested me, and all I needed was to hit upon the magic formula of denial and cajolery to convince her of my innocence. But when I opened my mouth I could not articulate a scenario of plausible deniability. The best I could manage was to sputter in my defense, “Ridiculous.”
She wrapped her lips around the filtered tip, sucked, and blew a rage of smoke across the room. She said, “You didn’t have the guts to face him. You stabbed him in the back and pushed him into the Danube.”
“In the back? Who told you he was stabbed in the back?”
“I saw his body,” she said.
“But in the back?”
She stared at me with bestial coldness. I imagined her teeth ripping a bloody coil of entrails from my abdomen. I closed my eyes and tried to remember that night on Szabadság Bridge. Had I invented his whirl and challenge, the beating I’d taken, and then the desperate plunge of knife that sent him over the edge? Had I instead stalked him from behind and stuck the knife into his back? Unable to bear such a cowardly act, my conscience might have fabricated a more heroic scenario. I had lost not only the ability to distinguish between truth and fiction, but the ability to differentiate between fictions. The wound to his back might just as easily have been caused by a propeller or other sharp object encountered as he bobbed along the Danube. But then she couldn’t have seen a wound to his back. Bortnyk would have stripped the sheet from the face of the corpse, and no more.
“Don’t believe anything Bortnyk tells you,” I warned. If I couldn’t lie convincingly about Sven’s murder, I could protest Bortnyk’s mutilations of the truth. “A few months before I met you, I had an affair with his fiancée. He threatened to kill me over it. He doesn’t believe I’m guilty. He told me so this afternoon. But he said he’d frame me for the murder, because he wants me dead. If he can kill me in a legal way, all the better.”
“You left a message at the Merkur, pretending to be Sven. You figured out that was how we contacted each other. I really thought it was him. I thought he left me. That was the only reason I ever let you touch me.”
“You want me to admit that? Okay. I called the hotel. I was jealous. Wanted to convince you that he’d taken off with somebody else. But I had no idea where Sven was.” True enough. I thought he still floated in the Danube!
She stabbed out her cigarette, lit another, watched me. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. She waited for something, but for what? The idea that Bortnyk would soon return bolted me up in terror. Perhaps she’d watch with a similar cruel patience while he murdered me in my bed. “We have to leave,” I said. “Pack your things.” Abruptly, I yawned. The first wave of an irresistible fatigue hit me. I fell back against the bed. Monika moved cigarette to lips but nothing else. If I fell asleep, she might pack her bags and steal away. These could be our last moments together. If she seriously thought I’d murdered Sven, she would be gone when I awoke. My emotions toggled between terror and indifference. Monika’s assertion that she hadn’t been at Lávka on the night we had met had shaken all my assumptions about the significance of the past month. If indeed it had been some other woman at whose feet I’d cast gastric roses, then Monika was not the fulfillment of a romantic destiny but a mistake. I had fallen in love at first sight with one woman and transferred my emotions onto a chance being; I’d involved myself in a completely arbitrary relationship that was in the process of destroying me. But Monika had lied to confuse me. She had been at Lávka that night. I had not made the error of mistaking chance for fate.
“It was the Gypsies,” I blurted. “Sven had stolen some of my counterfeit bills, remember?”
Monika’s glare varied neither by glance nor gesture.
“Look at my face!” I cried. “This is what they did to me. Sven probably made the same mistake. They chased him to the bridge, caught and killed him.”
“There were five hundred deutsche marks in his wallet when he was found,” she said. Her inflectionless voice made the implication no less clear; Gypsies would have robbed him before dumping his body into the river.
I tried to sit up and face her, hoping that if she saw my sincerity and adoration she would believe, but my limbs had turned to sand. The muscles in my neck seemed composed of millions of disconnected cells. My head collapsed onto the pillow. I could no longer see Monika and hadn’t the strength to turn to look. “According to who?” I asked, sounding distant to myself, as though voice spoke and ears heard in separate rooms. “You can’t believe anything Bortnyk says. He planted the money. Sure, the Gypsies did it. Killed Sven, tried to kill me. You have to pack. Get us out of here.” Pain receded to a red-hot mist somewhere beyond my body, and consciousness drifted fast behind. My ankle, face, and kidneys throbbed an edematous lullaby. What did any of this matter, compared to the delicious beauties of sleep? I must get the swelling down. “Soak these in cold water, will you?” I called, but sentience slipped out with the request.
A drugged sleep is not sleep but a clumsy burial of consciousness, wherein the corpus of thought is earthed but the odd sensation juts out like a stray appendage. The drug weighted and wrapped me like a winding sheet. I sank into the co
vers and springs, carpet, wood, and concrete, through the soft blanket of soil and rocky mantle to the warmth of the earth’s core. Perhaps I would meet Bortnyk wearing the double horns of a cuckolded devil! I remember laughing once. Something tugged at my arms. I dimly imagined Monika’s attitude had softened and she prepared me for bed. A coolness draped my face from brow to chin. She had decided to tend my wounds with a cold compress. For a brief moment, I felt warm and loved. I drew a deep breath, prepared to sigh in contentment. The smell was familiar but not immediately identifiable, something I associated with Monika but nothing so common as perfume or cigarettes. She voiced my name and several unintelligible words that ended with Sven. The scent locked into the region of the brain that matches olfactory stimuli to memory. Lighter fluid? The coolness ignited to sear my face with heat and light. I screamed and jerked my hands, reached instinctively to pluck the burning thing away, but something firmly secured me at the wrists. I hallucinated that Bortnyk sat at my head, clamping my arms while my face burned. I screamed Monika’s name, writhed, and nearly shook my neck from its socket. The burning cloth dropped to my chest. I bucked and rolled. It slipped from my chest to the floor, where it flamed to ignite the carpet. My arms held fast, secured to the bed frame by Canali silk ties. Secure in the privacy of the suite, I could burn to death, screaming, with no one but her to hear. I kicked the covers to the floor, swiveled my legs over the bed, and stamped at the flame.
She stood just beyond the bedroom door, listening and watching. I couldn’t see, but I knew she was there. The room reeked of lighter fluid, charred fibers, singed hair, and burnt flesh. I moaned and cried, called her name, and begged for mercy. She did not bother me with the courtesy of a reply. I did not see her leave. The door clicked once upon opening, and again at closing.
This is how I remember her when plagued by the banal aches of lost love, as I imagine she looked the moment she left, not as the compelling mask of eye shadow, rouge, and lipstick I so ardently loved, but stripped of makeup and dressed in something as plain as jeans and T-shirt: a stranger, someone so unremarkable that I could share an elevator with her for the twentieth time and not recall her face a moment later.
Gypsy Hearts Page 29
