“They didn’t trace us.” But she was already sobering, looking from left to right. Information technology and its finer points did not matter much to the crocodile brain. It wanted some physical distance. We hurried.
I started to feel safe when we were about a quarter of a mile away. I slowed, stopped, started stripping off the plasthene protection. Spanner followed suit. “How much did we make?”
She grinned. “Guess.”
“A lot.” I started to fizz again. A lot of money. For a few minutes’ work. “Tell me.”
“A hundred and four, maybe a hundred and five thousand.”
I laughed out loud, incredulous.
“Shut your mouth,” Spanner said, “you might drown in this rain.”
I was suddenly glad of the rain, glad to be getting wet. It was real. All that money. I felt dizzy. It made a mockery of what I earned at Hedon Road.
The Polar Bear was quiet, only half a dozen people in the place. Spanner had ordered us whiskey. I rolled the glass around in my hands, content to sniff at the fumes. Spanner was on her third drink in thirty minutes. She probably should not be drinking at all with the painkillers she was on. Now that the adrenaline high was fading, I was too tired to care.
“So, what will you do with your share?”
“I don’t know.” I sipped, enjoying the hot, smoky taste. After taking out start-up expenses and paying Tom his share, I’d have more than thirty thousand, tax free. I could drink this stuff every day. Live in a bigger apartment. For a while. “Maybe I’ll give it to someone.” Magyar might be willing to get Paolo’s address from the records. I tried to imagine his expression when he found he was thirty thousand richer. I stared into my glass. Such a warm, welcoming color.
Spanner reached over and covered the glass with her hand. “Who?”
“What?”
“Who are you giving it to?”
Giving the money to Paolo was a stupid fantasy. It wouldn’t help him or me. But I needed to talk—and who was there but Spanner? So I told her about Paolo. About him coming to Hedon Road, about his youth, his strangeness. About his eyes, the way they seemed to open when he realized I wasn’t mocking him, that I would teach him. How young he was, and vulnerable. How he had tried to kill himself. How I felt guilty.
She sipped at her drink. “You didn’t exactly cut off his arms and legs with an axe.”
“No. But I should have done something when I could. So should my father, my mother. Willem. Everybody.” I wanted her to see, to understand. I told her about the hotel room, the judgment in the Caracas case. How, when I had heard, I had shrugged in my air-conditioned hotel room and climbed back in the shower. “But how could I have known then, when I was only sixteen?” They had just been pictures on the screen. Somewhere inside I had thought the dirt on their faces to be makeup, their anguish an act.
But Spanner wasn’t listening. “Money means so little to you that you can afford to just give it away?”
“It’s not the money.”
“Of course it’s the money!” What else is there? She was scared, I realized suddenly. Money was all she had. If I didn’t think much of that, what would I think of her?
“Spanner…”
But she was almost hissing. “You make me sick, you know that? You’re an arrogant bastard. You think the world cares what you feel. You think you can make a difference, but you can’t.”
I had never seen her scared before. It made me uneasy. Something had changed. It had always been the other way around. But I wasn’t afraid anymore. She could not make me do anything I didn’t want to do, ever again. She had rescued me, and taught me to stay alive, but I had paid and paid and paid. I had paid enough.
I think she saw that, and I think it frightened her even more. I wanted to explain to her that I wouldn’t hurt her, that I wasn’t like everyone else she knew, but I didn’t know what to say—and I wasn’t sure if it was true.
She saw my indecision. “Poor little rich girl!”
“No.” I was too tired for this. I finished my drink and stood up.
“Not anymore. I work for my living. I work hard. I do a good job. It means something.”
“Shoveling shit means something?”
“What does your job mean?” I was suddenly blazingly angry: with her, with the world that had shaped her, at myself and all the things I had done or neglected to do.
“What does it mean to you that people pay to use you like a disposable tissue? Does the money make you feel good, worthwhile, even when you can’t move because of the pain and you’re all alone because you don’t have any friends? Does it make you feel good that you might have died if this poor little rich girl hadn’t decided to take pity on you? Does it make you feel good when you wake up in the morning hating yourself because of the things you did to make a quick hundred? Does it?”
I have never seen a snake in the second before it strikes, but I think I know how it would look. It would move its head back a fraction of an inch, it would close its nictitating membranes partway, and the sunlight would slide across hard gray fangs, dry as ancient bone. And then its expression would go blank as all the muscles but those it would use to strike, to drive the venom home into soft mammalian tissue, relaxed.
But then Spanner just picked up her drink, tossed it back, and smiled.
Chapter 22
Lore is eighteen. It is her birthday, or it might be. She is sitting in a tent erected inside some kind of warehouse, or maybe it’s a barn. The smells are certainly rural rather than urban: wine and garlic and oil, the occasional hint of grass too long in the sun. The Mediterranean, perhaps, or the South of France. She wonders how they got her here from the resort; she remembers nothing after the two men drugging her in the room.
She has been inside the tent for nearly three weeks, as far as she can tell. They keep her sedated. To begin with, they put it in her food, but because she does not always eat everything, they keep getting the dose wrong. One time, they gave her so much that she slept for over two days, or so they said. Now, though, her system is so saturated that they simply hand her a pill and stand over her while she puts it meekly in her mouth and swallows. But she thinks it is probably her birthday.
The tent is empty but for a sleeping bag and a bucket.
The bucket is emptied every twelve hours. Sometimes the tent stinks. She is humiliated. She is kept naked though not, she is sure, through prurience.
There are two men; one, the taller, wears clothes that always seem to smell of something frying, like fish; the other, shorter than Lore, moves fast and slightly sideways, like a crab. When they bring her food trays or empty her bucket or hand her the pills, both wear gloves, and hoods like ski masks. She has no idea what they look like, of their race or age, but she feels she could tell them apart even without the height discrepancy. The tall one, whom she thinks of as Fishface, seems nice.
He always averts his head when he enters, almost as though he is ashamed of what he is doing. The other one, though, Crablegs—she does not like him. He is the one who talks, the one who tells her to eat her pills or she will have to be tied up; the one who wakes her up and shouts at her that her family is refusing to pay the ransom.
It was Crablegs who brought in an old folding chair and a camera one time, along with a copy of a news flimsy.
“Sit on the chair,” he said, “and hold this in front of you, so they can see the date.”
Who? she wondered, but could not quite make her mouth shape the words.
He fiddled with the camera and brilliant light flooded the tent.
“Talk. Tell them you’re scared for your life.”
She was not scared. The drugs made everything seem distant and somehow irrelevant. Lore just sat there, blinking.
“Light’s too bright,” she slurred.
“You don’t like it?” He moved closer, shone it directly in her eyes.
She tried to hold up her hand to shield her face, but her finger’s felt like bunches of sausages, and the flimsy got
in the way.
“In front of you, I said. So they can see the date. So they know we haven’t killed you yet.”
Yet. She thought about that. She should be scared, but all she could feel was the smooth wood under her buttocks and the slick flimsy against her stomach. Naked, she thought, naked and vulnerable.
“Talk,” Crablegs ordered, and turned up the light.
She just wanted the light to go away, to go back to her cotton-wool dreams. She whimpered.
“That’s it, that’s better.” He filmed for a moment, then adjusted something near the microphone. “Now, tell them how much you want to get out of here,”
She wanted the light to stop. She wanted to lie down and sleep. “Please,” she said. A tear slid slowly down beside her nose, under the curve of her cheekbone, across the corner of her mouth and dripped off her jaw. “Please,” she said again. “Please…”
“Tell them.”
“I want to go home.” It didn’t matter that she slurred, it didn’t matter that after all she had been through to be an adult in the eyes of her parents they would see her like this: naked, vulnerable, weeping. “I want to go home. Please…”
He turned off the light. “You can stop now.”
But Lore couldn’t stop. Her weeping turned to wet heaving sobs, to hiccoughs.
“Oh, shut up. And get off the chair.”
She slid to the floor, clutched at his trouser leg.
“Get off me. Jesus.” He wiped at the slime on his leg. “Jesus.” He threw something at her—a handkerchief. “Clean yourself up.”
He left, carrying the chair and camera, still wiping at his trouser leg.
Her sobs steadied. She cried in a low monotone for hours and hours, until they gave her more drugs, and she slept.
But today is her birthday, at least it might be. Today, she can think a little.
The day began unpleasantly, when the pill she was handed with breakfast half dissolved in her mouth before she could swallow it. Afterward, when Fishface left, she spat clots of soggy white power into her hand, and wiped her hand on the floor. She ate nearly all the food on her tray in an effort to get rid of the taste on her tongue. Some time later she noticed that the leftovers on the plates were sausage, and croissant, and juice. Breakfast. It must be morning. And that was when she started to think, to try count the days, and realized it was her birthday.
Eighteen. She now owns her share of inherited stock in the family corporation. She is rich.
When Fishface brings her lunch tray, she is alert enough to slide the pill under her tongue and pretend to swallow. She can feel it dissolving and wonders how much will get into her bloodstream before she can spit it out.
Fishface’s hood moves slightly in what Lore interprets as a smile. She stares blankly at the floor, hoping he will not notice she is more alert than usual. She catches sight of the white smears on the floor and her heart jitters. She forces herself to look away, look at anything but the floor, and after a moment, he leaves. She waits, listens. Hears a door opening somewhere, then closing. She spits the pill into her hand. Where can she put it?
There is bread with the meal. She tears off a crust and pokes a hole in the dough, then hesitates. Maybe they give the scraps to a dog. They might notice if it fell asleep. She searches the floor of the tent, finds a tiny tear in the plastic. Underneath, she can feel the long, scratchy grain of old wood.. She pushes her finger one way, then another, finds a crack between the planks. She squeezes the pill through the hole and into the crack.
By now her lunch, soup and bread, is cold. She looks at it and remembers: Stella is dead. For a moment, she wishes she had the pill back, wishes she could just drift here, not thinking, until her parents pay up and she can go home. Then she will find it is all a nightmare. She never went to the resort. Tok never called. Stella isn’t dead.
All of a sudden she is angry with Stella. You have no right to make me grieve! she thinks. Her situation is difficult enough without grief—she needs to be able to think, to plan, not to feel leaden like this, awash with memory. When she gets out of here, she will tell Stella exactly what…
But Stella is dead.
Grief is more terrible than she ever thought possible. It is as though there is a hole right through her. She shakes, her muscles spasm and ache. It’s hard to swallow because her throat feels too tight, and her heart jumps and skitters. She is sweating. And then she understands. It’s the drugs. Lack of drugs. She’s withdrawing.
Over the next few days she works out a way to taper off the sedatives. The sodden lumps she spits from her mouth aren’t easy to divide, and sometimes she takes too much, but after six days, she is back to nothing, and no longer shakes.
She makes more holes in the bottom of the tent and explores the floor, a few splintery inches a day. On the fourth day of exploration, she finds a six-inch nail. It is old, rusty black iron, and bent at one end, but it comforts her to hold it between the fingers of her left hand, let it poke forward when she makes a fist. While she has a weapon she is more than a helpless victim. She can think, she can plan. At night, before she falls asleep, she tucks the nail down by her feet inside the sleeping bag. In the morning, she holds it in her fist and smiles.
The nail becomes the center of her universe. Her fingers begin to smell of rust, but for Lore, it is the smell of hope.
Chapter 23
I was still thinking about Spanner’s hard gray smile in the breakroom as the shift started draining their hot drinks, picking up masks, and standing, ready to get back to the last third of the night. The news was showing on the screen, but as I fastened my neck seal and strapped on waders, that dry-bone smile was superimposed on the changing pictures. The sound was off; but the female anchor was nodding at something the male anchor had said, her face composed in that caring expression they always affect when they talk about someone or some cause the listening public will want to take to their hearts.
I should not have said those things to Spanner. They should not have been spoken aloud. It was the kind of thing Spanner herself would have done, not me. Not Lore. And the snake would strike, sooner or later.
A close-up of the male anchor cut away to a second screen: a picture of a teenaged boy with the kind of feather cut that always looks so good on dusty black Asian hair. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was the chair he was tied to.
My muscles went rigid, as though my hands were tied to my sides. My body seemed in the wrong place, the wrong position, as if I should be sitting down.
The picture on the screen changed from the boy to me, sitting on the same chair. My body felt confused, in three places at once: sitting in a tent, in bright light, weeping and slurring; naked and bleeding on the cobbles, bathing in the light of images of myself tied to a chair; standing clothed—uniformed, anyway—in a hot breakroom.
The bell signaling the end of the break rang, but I just stood there, stupid and still and alone, while the pictures of me played. Eventually, the screen cut to the male anchor speaking soundlessly, and then back to the sixteen-year-old boy. Then a man, old enough to be the boy’s father, hurrying down some steps on a narrow street, the kind found in the centers of some Asian cities, shielding his face from the sun and bright camera lights.
I could move again. I turned up the sound. “-tape was given to the net an hour ago. Although the family refused to comment, a spokeswoman for the Singapore police department tells us she suspects the Chen family have known about the kidnap of Lucas Chen for over a week.”
Cut to female anchor, “And this isn’t the only similarity to the van de Oest abduction over three years ago.” Another picture, this time of a young Frances Lorien. Solemn-faced, arrogant. I wondered when it had been taken. I didn’t remember it.
I turned the sound off; and sat down. I stood up again, quickly. Sitting made me feel vulnerable, made me remember the light, the camera.
Not again. Not all those pictures running, over and over.
I looked at the screen again. The boy w
asn’t me, but the chair was the same, and the tent, the light. Everything.
Probably the same kidnappers. Kidnapper, I told myself. Fishface was probably three years dead.
“Bird!” Magyar. Hard-eyed and cross. “Break finished more than-”
“I know. Five minutes ago.” I felt unreal. Suspended somewhere between then and now Between Frances Lorien and Bird. “I’m Lore,” I whispered to myself. “I’m Lore.”
Magyar stepped closer. “What are you mumbling about?”
“You want to know who I am? Take a look. Up there. May as well look now as later. They’ll be playing it for days.” Poor Magyar, she didn’t understand. “What do you think—is it me?”
“What?”
I nodded at the screen. She glanced at it, then back at me, then, almost unwillingly, back at the screen. Her face began to change, muscles moving as her brain processed the information. I suppose it was a shock. She jerked her arm up and out to the volume switch.
“-with Oster van de Oest, live from Auckland.” The fountain was buttery with summer sunshine. Oster, used to cameras, had made sure the sun was behind him so he wouldn’t squint.
“We empathize with the family of Lucas Chen. We know how we felt uhen Frances Lorien was taken. We know that somewhere, someone knows where she is. Even after three years. We’re prepared to offer two hundred and fifty thousand for information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of our daughter.”
He looked different. Older. And so formal. He thought I was dead.
I turned the sound off. “It’s not Auckland, you know.”
Magyar looked at me blankly. “The house, Ratnapida. The family has an agreement with the news services not to reveal where we live.” They were showing more pictures of me. Magyar was looking back and forth from me to the screen. “Not that easy to see at first, is it? But you’d have spotted it eventually. It’s there, if you think to look.”
She was turned away from me now, studying the bright pictures, but she watched me from the corner of her eye.
Slow River Page 26
