12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  “Potential target. I always let the universe make the first move.”

  He held up a sheer black chemise with a red ribbon running through the top.

  “That’s the one,” she said, and he threw her the garment. It landed in her lap and she looked down at its shiny surface, a black that seemed to absorb everything and give nothing back.

  “I’m going to enjoy this,” he told her.

  “What did your wife do to get herself in jail?” Nicola asked.

  “Revolutionary work.”

  “For Greece or Turkey?”

  “Try to guess.”

  She looked at him. “I can’t tell,” she said. He smiled. “That’s probably because it does not matter,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You’re very, very good. How long have you been doing this?”

  “You’re my first customer,” Nicola told him.

  “Well, I am impressed.”

  “Do you have enough money now? To get her out?”

  “Close enough.”

  “And I assume a way back to Cyprus.”

  “That’s all taken care of.”

  “A false passport, that sort of thing?”

  “I’ll say nothing more.”

  “So you don’t really need to kill me. You can take my laptop and go.”

  “I guess I could. I could even go without the laptop since, as you say, you may have copied what you found on other disks that I don’t know about. But extradition is very difficult these days, and who knows, even in that case I might even prevail.”

  “So why not just walk away? I’d give you a head start, I promise.”

  Chorizo laughed. “But I like happy endings,” he said. He came very close to her and took her hand. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss it, but instead he began rolling up her sleeve. His touch is very gentle, Nicola found herself thinking. Her hands, still locked together, lifted slightly up toward him as if in the act of receiving communion. When her sleeve was rolled out of the way Chorizo pressed his thumbs gently near the crook of her elbow.

  “Oh, you have a beautiful vein here.”

  “So the boys tell me.”

  He took a prepared needle out from his black gym bag.

  “It only hurts if you look,” he said, pushing the needle into her skin.

  * * *

  Chorizo told her that since they were injecting the meth it would work much faster and the dosage was—he didn’t specify what, exactly. But he did say she would probably go before Dave. Those were his words, go before. She thought of it as a gesture, like someone opening the door for her in a restaurant. Dave was graciously allowing Nicola to die first. If Chorizo was telling the truth.

  Meanwhile Chorizo turned up the heat then uncuffed Nicola so she could change into the black chemise.

  “You don’t need your brassière,” Chorizo said.

  “I do, it’s a push-up,” Nicola told him. She turned the chemise toward him. “See, this has no support.”

  “I don’t need support.”

  “Oh you’d notice the difference.” She was thinking about the Narcon. Before she undressed she turned slightly away, as if being modest. The boat-necked nylon top was tight across her middle and held up by two narrow silk straps over her shoulders. As far as chemises go this one was a fairly long one—reaching to her thighs—and the skirt flared a little, like a baby doll dress. Underneath the brassière the material opened up into two sections, exposing her belly.

  Chorizo took her over to the mirror. “What do you think?”

  She looked herself over. Her legs looked even longer, and her black hair just touched the tip of her shoulders, brushing the silk straps. The red ribbon bobbed up and down through the fabric, calling attention to her breasts.

  “I look great,” she decided.

  Chorizo laughed. “You never stick to the script, do you? You say what’s on your mind.”

  “Lately I’ve been trying.”

  “I don’t even think you’re frightened. I admire your approach to death.”

  She thought of her heart, which was no longer racing. Was that a bad sign?

  “Oh, I’m frightened,” she said. “But what will that get me?”

  Chorizo laughed again. “I like you, I really do, little one. Listen. Let’s stop all this. Run away with me instead. I could teach you some things.”

  “Just you and me and your renegade wife.”

  Chorizo began rummaging through his gym bag. He brought out his manicure case.

  “Now. I hope you won’t be bored, but I don’t want to start all this too early,” he said.

  Nicola looked at her own nails, which were strong and unpolished.

  “How did your wife get caught, anyway?” she asked.

  Chorizo said, “It was an accident. Stupid.” He stopped for a moment, then said, “She could have died, but luckily … it was only her hands.” He looked down and continued pushing back the cuticle of his thumbnail.

  “Only her hands?”

  He was frowning, and Nicola wasn’t sure for a moment if he would go on or not. But he said, “A stupid accident. She was assembling a bomb and it went off. She was an antinationalist. She wanted Cyprus to let go of its allegiance to both Turkey and Greece. Her mother was Turkish, her father was Greek, and she hated them both.”

  He put down his cuticle pusher. “And they hated me. Her father called me untrustworthy.”

  Nicola said, “I can’t imagine.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t like this then. All this came after. After the accident. After she lost her hands and went to jail—twenty years, they gave her! And no one even died!” He shook his head. “I knew someone in New York and I went there and that’s when I was introduced to a Shambhala colony. I learned there what I needed to learn to survive. What I needed to get her out.”

  “And what was that?” Nicola asked.

  “The principles of Shambhala,” Chorizo said. “The principles of the spiritual warrior.”

  Nicola almost laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “The tradition of fearlessness, the tradition of human bravery. This is the very heart of what it means to be human. Now where is my hand lotion?”

  “Are you telling me that you killed those poor girls out of some misplaced spiritual sense of what, courage?”

  “I killed those poor girls for the money the videos would bring. In life we each have to make a personal journey and that was part of my personal journey. Cowardice is trying to live our lives as though death does not exist.”

  “Okay, that makes no sense.”

  “True fearlessness is not avoiding fear, but rather moving beyond it.”

  “You’re right,” Nicola told him, “I don’t understand any of this.”

  She was beginning to feel slightly warm, then a flush went through her, a kind of nausea. It was nausea, she decided, but somehow it didn’t feel altogether normal—like it was happening without her, or in an unusual part of her body.

  She was quiet for a while, and Chorizo looked up.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Actually I’d like to … lie down,” Nicola said. In truth she wasn’t at that point yet but she could feel it coming—a slow sensation like an oncoming tickle. She put her hands to her head because she figured it would help her case if she seemed worse than she was.

  “The futon couch opens up,” he told her. He put back his manicure case, then leaned over to pull the contraption into a bed. When it was flat she could smell the factory smell on the frame. She noticed there were no pillows or sheets.

  “I better get the camera,” Chorizo told her. “And I need to handcuff your hands behind you now. Otherwise they’ll get in the way.”

  “In the way of what?”

  Chorizo smiled. “I promise you’ll like it.”

  “But that wasn’t you on the video. I didn’t think you went in for this kind of thing, yourself.”

  “Not usually. But something tells me I’ll enjoy this one.
Besides, I’m due for a treat.”

  Nicola pushed some hair off her face with the top of her arm. “What, are you going to wear some disguise or something? A false nose?”

  “This one is not for the general public,” he said.

  “A private screening?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Just you and your wife.”

  He looked at her. “You are so clever,” he said again, but this time it didn’t sound so complimentary.

  Then he left the room, shutting the door behind him. When Nicola heard the sound of his shoes on the hard cement floor she stood up and ran to where Dave was sitting. Her mind was already beginning to feel a little looser, like something slipping away, and she felt a strange, almost itchy sensation on the palms of her hands.

  Don’t think, she told herself. Just stay on the task at hand.

  Kneeling sideways in front of Dave Nicola checked his front pockets. He opened his eyes and smiled and his pupils were dilated and his skin was a mottled white mask.

  Nicola said, “Shh.”

  It was awkward, what with her hands cuffed behind her and all, plus her fists were a bit too big to both fit into his pocket and too close to each other to keep one out of the way; nevertheless she managed to hold the pocket open with one hand and push her other hand in until she found what she was looking for: Dave’s miniature multi-tool, which contained, among other things, a tiny lock pick. She remembered Dave saying, back when he kidnapped her a hundred years ago, that he carried it everywhere.

  “Which one is the lock pick?” she asked Dave now.

  Dave looked at her. “Um,” he said. Then he closed his eyes.

  All right, then, she would find it. As she was turning over the tool she heard Chorizo swing open the trunk of his car. He was whistling a little. Quickly, Nicola went over to the mirror and turned so she could see her hands. She pulled out the miniature tools one by one, pressing buttons on the handle that released them, including a couple of buttons that seemed to do nothing, until at last she found the pick. Still watching herself in the mirror she twisted her hands trying to work the pick into the tiny lock before Chorizo came back.

  She couldn’t do it.

  When she heard his footsteps she went over to the futon and dropped the tool on the mattress then sat on it. Her head was pounding slightly. As Chorizo walked back into the room she was looking straight ahead of her at the dolls.

  “This one looks like me,” she said.

  “They all have names,” he told her.

  For a few moments he struggled, setting up the camera. The power cord didn’t quite reach and he wheeled the desk chair over to use as a camera stand. Then he had to adjust the chair so the camera would point up, then a little more down, then more to the right, and so on.

  “Half the time I turn this on by mistake,” he told her, fiddling with one of the buttons.

  “Really,” she said.

  “But I’m getting better.”

  He knocked the camera to the floor.

  “Do you need some help?” Nicola said. “I’m really good at technical things.”

  “Hah hah,” Chorizo said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re a woman,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Finally Chorizo had the camera set up the way he wanted. Nicola watched him move around the room adjusting the lights. She could feel the drug coming on like something creeping inside of her—it seemed to thicken, like paste. She knew she had to work fast.

  “Listen, before we begin, could you get me some aspirin?” she asked.

  “Your head should feel better soon.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t I get a last request or something?”

  “You’re thinking of a last meal.”

  “I’d like my last meal to be aspirin.”

  Chorizo laughed. “All right. Well, give me your hands.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to cuff you to the frame.”

  He started to take her arm to help her move but she said, “I can do it,” and she slid over a few inches to the side of the bed, moving the mini-tool with her slightly—enough—as she went. She could feel it now under her right thigh as Chorizo unlocked her right hand then locked her left hand to the left side of the bed. Well at least now she had one hand free. Her right hand. That might make things easier.

  “You’ll probably be more comfortable lying down,” Chorizo told her.

  “What?”

  “With your arm at that angle.”

  She lay down carefully, feeling exposed. The two folds of her chemise opened, exposing her stomach, and with her free hand Nicola pulled them closed again. Chorizo looked down at her and smiled.

  “You look fantastic.”

  “I feel like shit.”

  “That will change.”

  He picked up her clothes and folded her shirt, put her clothes on the table near Dave, then he leaned over and felt Dave’s forehead. He looked at his watch. “Nine o’clock,” he said. He went out the French doors and locked them behind him.

  Nicola quickly sat up and glanced at Dave, who was nodding a little.

  “Dave, stay with me,” she told him. “Dave.”

  He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Nicola pulled out the minitool. Had she ever picked a lock before? She turned the tool, trying to get the pick angle right. Once she slid open a dead bolt with a credit card, but that probably didn’t count.

  She could hear Chorizo walking around upstairs, wearing those ridiculous shoes. One thing she liked in a man was good taste in footwear. Well, her taste was definitely slipping. People told her after thirty that she would stop being so picky. And here she was, attracted to a man who polished his own nails compulsively because his wife no longer had hands.

  The pick twisted in her hand up and down, then back and forth. What was she trying to accomplish here? As best she could tell she should move the pick this way and that until things fell in place. But what? Nicola closed her eyes and imagined the miniature mechanism inside the cuff. A small curved bar, no longer than a pen point. Time was slowing down again—how long did she have? She was beginning to feel dreamy. She was falling into a dream.

  But then, suddenly, she felt the ping of the lock releasing. Oh my God, she’d done it. Slowly Nicola extended her fingers against the metal ring. The cuff widened, letting her hand go. Her knuckles hurt, but she kept pulling it open notch by notch until at last she got the ring big enough to slip her hand in and out. Then, the cuff still nominally on, she slipped the multitool out and dropped it under the futon bed.

  She wanted to look handcuffed still. She wanted to catch him off guard. The bed was positioned so he could see it through the glass doors as he came down the steps; if she wasn’t there he’d see that and have time to prepare.

  The vial of Narcon was still in her bra. She was going to need it soon.

  But what if he cuffed her hands back together? Her plan was to strike when he was vulnerable, too.

  If she could, that is. If she could. I’ll keep him talking, she thought. But her mind slipped for a moment and when she came back he was already down the stairs, unlocking the doors. Where had she been? She hadn’t heard him on the stairs. Keep it together, Nicola told herself. She tried to concentrate but it felt as though she was just squeezing an empty tube.

  “See his color?” Chorizo said. He was looking at Dave, who was fully unconscious now. “It doesn’t look good. You, though, with your dark hair—the paleness is striking.”

  He handed her the aspirin and watched her examine the tablets.

  “Oh, it’s aspirin all right,” he said. She swallowed it down and he felt her forehead. Then he watched her for a moment. “You’re going faster than I thought. You must not do any drugs?”

  “A good little girl.”

  “Well, I think it’s time now.”

  She didn’t know if he meant time to do drugs or time to get on with the show. Chorizo looked through the ca
mera lens and adjusted the angle and looked through it again. Then he took off his shirt. His back was hairy, and it looked like he shaved part of his neck. She hated that.

  “Okay,” he said when he was down to his briefs. He sat down beside her. His thigh was touching her thigh. “As a way of settling into things, I like to tell a story. Don’t worry, it’s very short. It’s about a crocodile and a monkey.”

  Nicola shifted away from his leg. “A crocodile and a monkey? I think I know this one.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “The crocodile tricks the monkey into taking a ride across some water? Because he wants to eat his heart? But when the monkey finds out he tells the crocodile he left his heart back in the tree?”

  “Well, well,” said Chorizo.

  “Is that the one?”

  “You are absolutely full of surprises.”

  “I’ve always liked that story.”

  “So have I,” said Chorizo. He put his hand on her knee. “Because it shows what you need to survive. Spirit, intelligence, and strength of mind.”

  Behind her, Nicola extended her fingers slightly inside the handcuff, testing its parameters. She could still slip her hand in and out.

  “I thought it had more to do with courage and cunning,” she said.

  “Now you, you have intelligence, that’s clear. Like the monkey. But what about spirit? The spirit of adventure?”

  Nicola closed her eyes for a moment. “You’re thinking about last week at the café. When you asked me out and I ducked.”

  “That’s right. I was hopeful at first, but it turns out there was no spirit there, just a … a playful girl wearing a mask. For a while you can pretend to take chances. For a while. But a taste for real adventure? No.”

  “You’ve known me for how long?”

  “It doesn’t matter, I know you. I know you. I’ve seen you all over the world. The competent woman. You’re smart, you’re good at your job, you’re a careful manager. You keep track of all the details. And your fear of letting go is so great.”

  For a moment Nicola felt shrunken. Was that all she was? A manager? But she said, “Well, maybe the monkey was like that, too.”

  “The monkey?”

  “He kept hold of the crocodile even under the water. He didn’t let go.”