The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  The hotel had two exits on the ground floor: the one they’d entered off the street to the front and the other directly opposite, down a long hallway to a dining room and then the back that opened onto a walled-in garden. The layout was crap as far as an escape went, but it had probably worked to their advantage. The building had but one exit, Lumani would be there with his rifle and so had allowed his henchman to come up alone.

  Munroe motioned Neeva to the stairs and down half a floor. They stopped on the small landing. Munroe turned on the phone and located the preset for Lumani’s number.

  Made the call.

  No Lumani, only a mechanized woman’s voice in French and then the tone for voice mail. Munroe hung up, dialed again. To Neeva, she said, “I need you to start crying.”

  Neeva said, “Wha’?”

  “A man just tried to kill you. You’re an actress, I need a fit of hysterics—but without any noise until we head down the stairs. Can you do it?”

  Neeva nodded.

  Munroe dialed Lumani again. More French.

  Hang up. Repeat.

  Repeat.

  On the fifth attempt, Lumani answered.

  “Did you hear the shooting?” Munroe said. She spoke in English.

  He didn’t ask who she was, sounded neither surprised to hear from her nor disappointed. “I heard,” he said. “Since you call me, I assume it’s Tamás who is the dead one.”

  Ah, so Tamás was the name for Arben Two.

  “You don’t sound angry,” she said.

  She could hear the inaudible shrug. “This will be a problem for me because his incompetence becomes my failure.”

  “Your problem, you fix it,” Munroe said, quoting the Doll Maker.

  “Yes,” he said, and his tone had a bite. “I’ve taken fault for him more than once. I won’t cry that he’s gone.”

  “Can you see the police? How far away are they?”

  “There’s traffic, maybe two minutes.”

  “I’m bleeding,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Not really,” she said. “It saves you the trouble. The plan was never to let me go, you would have killed me the moment your delivery was successful.”

  The sirens were louder, would be at the hotel soon.

  “You are waiting for me, Valon, you and your rifle. Are you here to kill me or to take back your merchandise?”

  “Both,” he said, and then paused. “Did you know about Logan? Did you know before you ran?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Does he mean nothing to you?”

  She heard pain in his voice.

  “He means everything to me,” Munroe said. “But you overestimated my ability to bear the impossible. There’s no winning for me no matter what I do.”

  “It was not me,” he said. “Was not me that made the decisions. I follow rules, just like you.”

  The sirens were outside in the front of the hotel now.

  “Not like me,” she said. “Everyone has a choice. Even when there’s a gun to your head you still have a choice. I made my choice, and you, Valon, you don’t have a gun to your head.”

  Munroe hung up. Turned to Neeva. Her cheeks were flushed, her skin mottled and red, her eyes puffy and swollen, and tears ran down her face.

  “Now you can start screaming,” Munroe whispered.

  They took the stairs at a near run, heading toward the front door with Neeva in hysterics, the two of them nearly colliding with the first of the police officers who had come in cautious and guarded through the front door.

  “Upstairs,” Munroe yelled. English first. Then Italian. “Upstairs, upstairs, the man with the gun is upstairs.”

  Without moving his eye from the scope, Lumani returned the phone to his pocket, drew a breath, and tried to block out the sting. He shouldn’t care, had no reason to care what she said.

  Prove himself stronger and smarter than his opponent. Reclaim the package. Kill what stood in his way. Succeed in the mission. These were the things that mattered. She, with her words and her strategy, was not a person but an obstacle and a challenge. She was prey. Formidable prey, but prey nonetheless. Yet it pleased him to speak with her, and it puzzled him that it should. Perhaps like a cat playing with the mouse: entertainment before food, although the food had just bit him, and this he didn’t like.

  Lumani lay prone against the wooden bench, off which he’d tossed cushions and dragged from the living area, propped on his forearms, rifle on a bipod, the scope and muzzle continuing out between gauzy curtains that hung over open balcony doors four stories up and at an angle to the hotel. He had a clear shot of the entrance—the only way his prey would be able to reach the street—and she would be a fool to wait inside with the police on their way in.

  She could have left the last of the trackers in an empty room and jumped the garden wall or gone out a window, while, like a fool, he waited her out, but his predator’s instinct had said that she remained in the hotel.

  Feeling the trap, he’d sent Tamás. Now Tamás was dead, and instead of flushing her, as Lumani had intended, he was left second-guessing, watching the entrance while police cars circled, forced to wait out instinct in the hide he’d accessed by bullying the old lady who’d been home when he’d come knocking.

  She was in the kitchen now, secured to a chair with her own tablecloth and quieted with a freshly laundered dish towel in her mouth.

  He might eventually kill her. Or he might not.

  He was not a thug like the others, brutes who couldn’t adapt to situations as they unfolded. He was not useless overdeveloped muscle who took pleasure in the screams and the crying and the fear, who felt manliness in unearned respect or felt nothing at all. His job was the capture, and he was a professional to whom killing was occasionally a part of the work: messy but necessary, preferably executed from the business end of a rifle where he wasn’t forced to touch the dead.

  The screaming sirens were in front now, four cars with engines running and lights flashing, uniforms approaching the front door with far less precaution than he would have deemed prudent. She would need to exit the hotel soon unless she planned to be taken into custody because of Tamás’s death.

  In anticipation of the hit, Lumani rested his index finger alongside the trigger guard, controlling his breathing so his heartbeat didn’t pulse heavy through his fingers, his hands, his shoulder, and knock off his aim.

  Onlookers, summoned by the sirens like zombies to the living, gathered from apartments and shops, curious, stupid, stupid people with their cell phone cameras waiting to catch some action to send to friends or post online, lucky people because Tamás had gone in to blow down doors and not the entire building.

  Sirens. Police. Crowds. And still no sign of his prey.

  Questions and self-doubt percolated and mixed into a potent cocktail.

  He couldn’t afford another failure.

  Inside his head, the sparklers tickled, the collapse was there at the edge of his senses, creeping closer because of the need for sleep and the ongoing lack of success. Soon. Soon enough he could lock himself into a hotel room for days and pump toxins and chemicals into his system in a form of rapturous release from the pressure of perfection and the agony of rejection and nonexistence.

  But not yet.

  Lumani took his eye off the scope.

  The window of opportunity was closing. He risked the streets being cordoned off, risked getting caught in a random photograph posted on the Internet, risked visual proof that tied him to the scene when the police came around for witnesses.

  He inched backward, drawing the rifle with him. Froze.

  The prey and the package barreled through the door, huddled together and covered in dust as if they’d escaped a bomb blast. Eye returned to the scope, Lumani followed them and drew in the magnified version: Michael, bleeding as she’d said, from her face and legs. She limped and yelled about a shooter, switching between perfect English and broken Italian, words that he read on he
r lips. Her clothes were different. Everything was different. And the package—good God—worthless now, emaciated and hairless.

  Officers who hadn’t yet entered the hotel ushered the women away from the door, victims to safety, and once they were away from the door, the curious and the crowds drew nearer so that Michael’s head dipped and dodged between others’, limiting his line of fire.

  Lumani’s lips twisted into a vicious smile. She’d waited to use the police and the crowds as diversion and deflection; she’d timed this to limit his ability to take the shot. He snorted. As if that would make any difference.

  Crosshairs on the target, Lumani calculated, deliberated, waited through the movement. Exhaled slow and measured. And then Michael turned, leaned beyond the brown hair on the head that separated her from him, and stared straight at him. Finger to her temple and thumb in the air, mock gun to her own head, she pulled an imaginary trigger.

  His heart reacted as if physically tagged.

  Another slow breath in countermeasure and he moved his finger from trigger guard to trigger. So little pressure to send the death.

  But his hand shook. The crowd parted slightly. Michael’s back was toward him again and she, with the bald girl at her side, moved slowly away from the hotel.

  So little pressure.

  He could make the hit.

  He could end the life of this person who, by her very existence, proved his own worthlessness, who had with no effort earned Uncle’s approving affection.

  If he could calm.

  But his heart continued to beat heavy and he felt the thud in his fingers. The kind of beating that wouldn’t be stilled by breathing or lack of breath.

  Confused, he pushed back the panic at this new imperfection.

  No.

  Not imperfection, this was strength. For the first time in memory, the kill wasn’t business. This was personal, and this beating was passion warming: the first sensation of what it meant to desire the death of another for pleasure.

  More sirens wailed from far down the street.

  Lumani drew backward. Disassembled the rifle and packed it up. Returned to the kitchen, a room with barely the floor space for the tiny table and two chairs tucked to its sides: a room built for the lonely. The woman was in the center of the area, bound as he’d left her, but the cloth was out of her mouth; she’d found a way to rid herself of the gag but hadn’t called out or raised the alarm—a wise choice that had kept him from having to permanently silence her.

  Her chin raised when he stood in the doorway, face haloed with short curly hair clearly dyed to hide the gray. He imagined that she, in her independent solitude, might be a grandmother; wondered what it must feel like to have a pillowy mother figure with the warmth and care and universal acceptance mothers were said to provide. He envied the imagined offspring.

  The woman stared up at him with soft rheumy eyes while he deliberated eliminating this witness as a professional should, then he stepped into the room and patted the old woman on her head—a form of affection, he thought, to this mother of sorts. His movement came jerky and awkward and not at all familiar to what he expected a touch to an old woman should be.

  Lumani blocked the apartment door open on his way out so that when he was gone, she could call for help. This was like the people who paid money to … What was the American word? Offset? Yes, to offset a carbon footprint for their wasteful lifestyles. He had paid in professionalism for the pursuit of death. No matter that it was passion for watching another die that spurred him on now, he was not like Arben and Tamás. To prove his point, he had allowed the old woman to live, and now he would go kill Michael.

  Munroe guided Neeva through the crowd of onlookers, gatherers who’d arrived in the wake of the sirens and lights, past the police cars. There were others, too—fellow hotel patrons who, after the shooting ended, and realizing the police had arrived, had also made their dash for freedom, adding to the confusion and the crowds.

  They continued along the sidewalk, away from the hotel, Munroe waiting for the instant death that might or might not come and caring not one way or the other. One bullet and the pain would stop. But the death never came.

  And so Munroe moved Neeva onward, more quickly now that they were beyond the police. Additional sirens called from down another street, undoubtedly summoned as backup after the first on scene had experienced the guests pouring out and seen the hotel proprietor on the floor of the lobby. She didn’t think the owner was dead, although they’d passed through too quickly to confirm—for conscience’s sake, she hoped he was still alive.

  Neeva, by her side, legs moving twice as quickly as Munroe’s, continued to sob. Munroe said, “You can stop crying now,” and from one breath to the next, the tears dried up.

  As she had done so many times in the past hours, Munroe turned down streets at random, moving slower this time not only to accommodate Neeva but also her own weakening, stopping occasionally to ask strangers for directions to the nearest metro, only to deliberately head off course, doing the mental math: trying to avoid making a beeline for her destination without taking so long to get there that Lumani was able to project her plan and arrive before she did.

  One more phase and she could stop. This last strategic play meant, at least for the night, that the constant movement and the adrenaline spikes would be over, meant she could sleep.

  The metro station led off the street and to the underground. If Lumani followed, and Munroe expected he would, he would be methodical and slow. She’d picked off two of his men in one day, and he’d be concerned about avoiding strategic errors, although why he hadn’t taken the shot outside the hotel puzzled her.

  The train arrived, and with rush hour long past, they found seats easily. Munroe caught stares from two passengers across the aisle and swiped at her forehead. Neeva handed her a washcloth that she’d apparently taken from the hotel, and Munroe tamped down the blood.

  To Neeva she said, “Are you still willing to go through with your plan—to be used as bait?”

  The girl didn’t answer immediately, and Munroe switched on the cell phone. “I can’t guarantee this will work,” she said. “And there’s the possibility we only half fail—that you end up getting taken and I can’t get you back. I need to know you’ve seriously weighed the consequences and I’m not gambling with your life without your consent.”

  Neeva stared at the floor a long while and then looked up. “I understand the consequences,” she said, “and yes, I’m still willing.”

  Munroe reached for Neeva’s hand. Squeezed it. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe,” she said, and when Neeva smiled in reply, Munroe turned to the phone and worked as quickly as the spotty cell signal would allow, utilizing credit card numbers she’d had and memorized for years, setting the steps out in advance that would get them to the end of the night.

  “Okay, then,” Munroe whispered, and she dialed Lumani.

  When he answered, she said, “I want to make a trade.”

  A heartbeat of pause, then Lumani said, “You’ll give up the package?”

  “I can’t protect her,” Munroe said. “I’m bleeding. Weakening. You’ll take her from me, anyway. But I want the girl in the United States freed as was the original offer.”

  “That was before you killed Tamás.”

  “I still want it.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “No guarantees?” she said.

  “I can’t. But like you said, I’ll take her from you, anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot?” she said.

  “The timing wasn’t right.”

  “You want me dead,” she said.

  “Yes, badly.”

  “I’m going to leave her at a restaurant for you to pick up,” she said. “I won’t be there.”

  “I’ll still find you.”

  “Possibly, but not tonight.”

  “Where will you put her?” he said.

  “I’ll call you when I figure it out.”

&
nbsp; THE TAXI MUNROE had arranged for was waiting at the station when they arrived, and the transfer from train to platform to stairs to car made seamlessly. Munroe gave the driver the name of the hotel she’d booked across town and, seated in the comfort of the backseat, fought the body’s command to drift to sleep—sleep Neeva quickly succumbed to.

  Buildings rose like silent sentinels standing guard along the way, their facades framed and shadowed by streetlights, casting an otherworldly impression over sidewalks alive with pedestrian traffic. Munroe studied the eateries, searching for one that would abet her purpose, and when she found it, signaled the driver to pull over.

  Her instructions were simple. Drive around the block at least once, and upon the return, idle down the street with the meter running. “When it’s time to leave,” she said, “it might be with two sleeping people, and I’ll probably need your help.” She waved a wad of cash. “Assuming you’re available.”

  The driver’s smile widened and he nodded. “Yes, available,” he said.

  Munroe nudged Neeva, and the girl came awake grudgingly. “It’s time,” she said, and Neeva scooted out of the taxi with her.

  The restaurant filled a corner, the front well lit and inviting, but the side street mainly in shadow, and most of the tables set out under awnings along the fronting still empty.

  Munroe called Lumani, and although she suspected he wasn’t far away, she gave him the coordinates. She placed Neeva at the table in a corner, in a chair whose back faced the windowless side of the restaurant, and left all of the bags but the satchel at her feet.

  Munroe pulled the trackers and the handmade envelope from her pocket. Scribbled a fake address on it. Neeva forced a smile, but reflective of the stress and exhaustion, the gesture came out crooked. Munroe said, “I promise.” And with a kiss on the top of the girl’s head, walked away.