The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

by Joseph Fink

  Meanwhile, you were panicking over a tiny fox. Here’s what I would have done. First I would have closed the bedroom door. Then I would have opened the front door. Then, I would have removed the four-day-old leftover beef tacos from the fridge and dropped them in a trail from the bedroom to the front door. It’s not a large apartment, Craig. That animal is starving and would have gotten out in a hurry.

  But you did not do that. You yelled at it, Craig. Why are you yelling “Get out!” at a feral animal? I don’t need to explain the limitations of human language to you, do I? It is a fox, and it is disoriented and scared. Can you imagine how you would feel if a monster ten times your size stood above you and shouted incomprehensible noise? You’d feel terrorized, Craig.

  I don’t know if you’d turn that fright into a lunge, and a growl, and a gnashing of teeth on that monster’s calf, but that’s what the fox did to you.

  There are certain ways I handle problems, and certain ways you handle problems. Either way, the fox got out of your home. It took a neighbor calling the Sheriff’s Secret Police after hearing your screams, and animal control having to tase the fox and cart it off in a cage. (Don’t worry. I snuck into their truck and released it later.) You were taken to the hospital and given sixty stitches and painful rabies shots.

  While you were in the hospital, I called Mastercard back and asked to speak with Devin. I had to get through a fairly complicated phone tree, but I finally found him. I told him that the noise he heard was only a bad communal dream we both experienced, but now everything’s fine. Devin was crying. He said he was afraid he was going to die. I said, as gently and honestly as I could, “It’s better than the alternative.”

  Devin agreed to send you another letter double confirming that your balance is zero.

  I hope when you’re out of the hospital, Craig, you’ll feel convinced and move on. The doctors say the infection in your calf is bad. It was made worse by you passing out when you saw your own fibula behind the flesh torn away by the fox. If you had gotten immediate attention, an early treatment of antibiotics would have really helped.

  You’re thoughtful and tender, Craig. It makes my task difficult sometimes.

  Speaking of credit cards, today you received a low interest, low spending limit card (just $1,000) from American Express. This one doesn’t come with any airline or hotel points. But it will help you rebuild your credit score, and I know you’re not interested in traveling anyway. You have family on your mind, I’m sure, now that you’ve had a girlfriend for almost two years.

  Two years! Amaranta is a lovely woman. Good sense of humor. Incredibly smart. Contagious smile and elegant style. Such lush black hair, like velvet drapes. She has a stable job at the bank, working directly under the vice president Steve Carlsberg, probably the nicest (if chattiest) person in town. He really treats his staff well, with good pay, benefits, and a positive work environment.

  Amaranta’s a good one, Craig. What a twist of fortunate fate, that fender bender. She hit her brakes for seemingly no reason, and you tried to swerve but clipped her bumper. Technically it was your fault because you rear-ended her, but she slammed on her brakes with no one in front of her. She said she thought she saw an old woman jump in front of her car, but no one else saw the woman there. Plus she couldn’t remember what the woman’s face looked like, so probably just a trick of the eye.

  Blame didn’t matter though. You two were both so apologetic. You’re a gentle soul, Craig. I knew you would be forgiving about it. She’s more emotional, and overly critical of herself. I’m sure this is because of her overbearing father, who constantly negated her achievements with his lack of enthusiasm for everything from Girl Scout badges to prophetic dreams to softball championships.

  So a car accident, even a minor one at low speeds, was hard on her. Had she been run into by a more selfish or aggressive driver, that person might have twisted the insurance reporting in their favor, or held out, or worse, sued. And she would have let it eat away at her like the infection eating away at your calf.

  But it was you who ran into her. And your empathy is contagious. You put her at ease. And she brought out the best in you. She’s practical and assertive. She helped make calls and fill out forms. She showed you the number to call for repairs. I hope her proclivity toward assertiveness rubs off on you.

  The best part about that accident, though, was it happened at dinner time, right in front of that new Italian restaurant that recently opened: Maledizione. You both decided to step inside and talk through insurance paperwork over a cappuccino, but then that turned into a pasta dinner, tiramisu, and wine. You wanted to ask her for her number, but you already had it, and I’m pretty sure you backed down because you didn’t want to ask if you could call for non-insurance reasons. But then, to your surprise, she called you a few nights later. Granted, she didn’t mean to call you. Her phone just dialed your number somehow.

  “It must have been a butt dial,” she said.

  “Ha ha,” you said. Well, not said, but nervously choked out.

  “I had a nice dinner the other night,” she said.

  “Me too,” you said.

  A pause. Say something, I hissed to you from the top of the bookshelves where I had wormed my way behind the potted plants.

  “Maybe we can do it again,” you said.

  “That sounds fun,” she said.

  There was a longer pause. I was losing my mind that evening, Craig. If you had turned, you would have seen a strange, long hand absentmindedly tearing your potted plants to shreds.

  Then she said, “Well, talk to you soon,” and you both hung up.

  After thirty minutes of pacing around your living room, you called her back. You did it on your own. I had unplugged your cable and internet so that you were unable to numb yourself with escapist entertainment. I certainly played my part, but you made the decision yourself. And almost two years later, you’re still in love.

  Lately, though, she’s not been happy. I know you can’t hear me over the commotion of the ICU: the other patients with their wounds and ailments, the din of the malfunctioning snack machine, the off-key cackle of a doctor down the hall, the furious buzz of the fluorescent lighting.

  I thought you were losing interest in her, but it’s your poor finances, isn’t it? You were afraid you couldn’t pay for dates with maxed out cards, that she would see your failures and not love you. So instead you pulled away from her.

  I have taken care of your credit, Craig. You don’t need to worry about how. I will not let you fail. I will never let you fail. I’m texting Amaranta right now to thank her for coming to see you in the hospital today. I’ll leave some promotional cards for Maledizione lying around your apartment, so you’ll get the idea that an anniversary dinner is in order soon. How romantic it would be to return to where you first met her. Such a good restaurant, traditional red sauce Italian, low lighting, good service, and waiters who mutter unhappy secrets to each other in the kitchen.

  Take care of yourself, Craig, so you can take care of others. You’ll never meet a woman as wonderful as she is. A mother as wonderful as she will be. I’m positive of it. Not in this small town. You two will be so happy together, I will make absolutely certain of it.

  Execution

  1810–1813

  1

  Success is not in the idea, but the execution.

  This was the first lesson of my life of crime. It was also my last, but I get ahead of myself.

  Here I was, a woman of eighteen, seemingly alone on the streets of Hamburg. My eyes were closed, because what I needed to find was best found by hearing alone.

  This is what Hamburg sounded like: cries of merchants trying to outcompete on prices for a clatter of ornate glassware from Venice, a shimmer of bells from the mountains of Franchia, and a thud of oranges from southern Spain, packed in straw and wrapped in canvas to try to mitigate their decay. The wet breath of horses and the clatter of their hooves. A swirl of German and French, a smattering of Dutch, shouts in the
strange guttural language of Luftnarp. The muffled growl of the ocean, providing the reason for everything else I was hearing.

  I let my mind drift over all of this, picking out the one sound I needed. There it was. A few words, in a dialect that was rare in this part of the world, a heavily coded slang used by certain sailors in the eastern Mediterranean. The chances of anyone but my targets speaking that were, well I had never had a formal education in mathematics but they didn’t seem high. I opened my eyes and zeroed in on the rough-dressed men muttering and hurrying toward their ship.

  Picking my way carefully through the crowd after the men, I inclined my head slightly in their direction. In response to my command, the most beautiful man in the city, quite possibly in Napoleon’s entire flicker of an empire, stepped into their path. I say “beautiful” as an objective measure. His looks stopped activity in their tracks, and his smile caused symptoms that would give any doctor concerns. His name was André du Lièvre.

  André broke into a smile that was both friendly and relieved, as though he had been looking all over the city for a filthy group of sailors and couldn’t believe his luck that he finally had stumbled upon them. They frowned suspiciously as André lifted his arms in greeting.

  “My friends and comrades,” he said. God, he was nearly irresistible when he spoke in that friendly voice that was just this side of flirtation. “I’m told you are the best crew the North Sea has to offer.”

  It would be impolite and perhaps impossible to disagree with such a compliment delivered with such a smile, and so they could only murmur as he strode with them toward their ship, laying his arm across the shoulders of one of them causing him to jump nearly out of his rags. One would think that being so beautiful and charming, so impossible to forget, would be a detriment to a career as a thief, but André knew his tools and how to leverage them.

  A large hand fell onto my own shoulder, and I patted it without turning around. In the cacophony of the port, I hadn’t heard Lora approach. Despite her monumental size, at least two feet taller than me and with thick ropes of muscle, Lora could move with utter grace and stealth. She was, through years of training and lived experience, extraordinarily aware of her body, the limit and the length of it, and how to maneuver it through the world.

  “André is putting on too much of a show,” she grumbled.

  “Oh, let him have his fun.”

  The charming man in question had reached the ship which was in the frantic process of unloading. Under new Napoleonic law, ships were given free berth for the first half day. After that a tax was exacted in the form of a length of wood from the ship’s structure. Neither the owner nor the captain had any say on which part of the ship the wood was removed from, and it could be as harmless as a panel from the Captain’s wardrobe or as vital as one of the ship’s great ribs, leaving it floundering in the harbor’s shallow waters. This process was repeated every half day until the ship either left port or was decidedly no longer able to, at which point it would be confiscated by the French empire, and so the sailors hauled crates and bundles down the planks at a furious pace. André left a wake of stillness in his passage, as sailors and customs officials all stopped to gape. Gathering those nearby around himself with a vague beckoning of one hand, he began a long story, a story that had neither beginning nor end but a nearly inexhaustible quantity of middle, leaving Lora and I ample time to get our work done.

  We ducked around the piles of cargo, seeking a particular chest of daggers. The chest was set to be delivered to a peasant revolution growing in the frontiers of Svitz, a movement called the Green and White. Our job was to divert that delivery into the hands of The Duke’s Own, which would find a more profitable and less righteous use for the weaponry. We acted not out of any partisan fervor, but because the pay was right. Motivation does not have to be complex. In our line of work, simple motives were generally better.

  Lora, barely having to raise herself up, located the chest at the top of the tallest stack, and commenced heaving it out. I leaned nonchalantly against a crate, or as nonchalantly as I could. One sailor who was, for whatever reason, immune to André’s charms, sauntered out from one of the rows and gaped at the young woman and the giant who were absconding with their goods.

  “Thieves!” he squalled. I am unsure why it is the crew cared so much, since they owned nothing on the ship or the dock other than their own clothes and the promise of future pay, and, depending on their fortunes in the daily card games, sometimes not even that, but an element of pride made them fiercely protective of what they were unloading, and several abandoned André’s morass of a story to charge us with fists and whatever weapons happened to be on their person. Unfortunately for them, they encountered Lora, who turned from her work just long enough to swat the first man to the ground with a tragic crack. I wouldn’t have wished to be him in the coming weeks.

  As more men barreled in, Lora turned fully to engage them and I tucked myself behind her. This position was somewhat safer, although I did find myself uncomfortably compressed every time she was jostled backward. From my position, I could not see the fight as it unfolded, but one only needs to hear so many bones break before one gets the gist.

  The sounds of violence were halted by a voice habituated to immediate obedience. “Make way for her Ladyship.”

  I peeked around Lora to see the guard who had spoken. A lackey, but a well-dressed and apparently well-paid one. Behind him, a woman in the kind of dress that takes nearly as long for her to put on as it would take me to earn the money to afford. She glanced at the mess of injured bodies with placid, polite eyes. A politician then. Some royals are temperamental, but some are survivors, with the skill of hiding what they feel. Those were the ones that truly had to be watched out for.

  The sailors who were still able to stand all scattered as the woman and her retinue descended and crossed the port. None of us knew which royal family she belonged to or even if they happened to be in possession of any kind of throne at that moment. The details of power rarely matter. What matters is the impression of power. My crew, of course, had been well trained to be immune to niceties, so André took the opportunity to give a quick good-bye wink to the ship’s cook and then performed a graceful dive off the dock into the filthy water of the harbor. Lora slung the heavy chest of daggers that now belonged to us onto her broad back, and the two of us began to hurry away.

  One of the sailors, bug-eyed with rage but unable to give chase without crossing the path of the woman, spat at us, and the saliva landed a few feet from the noblewoman. A soft pop against hot wood. The sailor groaned. The woman stopped and turned her head ever so slightly toward the offending man. Her men tensed behind her. After a few seconds, long enough to communicate volumes of conceivable torture, she turned back to her dignified walk. Her guards kept their glaring eyes on the crew of sailors, helpfully keeping them too terrified to chase after Lora and me.

  By the time the noblewoman was at a safe distance, we were long gone, and so the sailors went grumbling about their work, and later grumbling to their drink, a beer hall hanging over the water. Among them was the final member of my gang of thieves, one who was never noticed wherever she went.

  2

  Reunited in the attic that was our temporary haven in Hamburg, we opened the heavy wooden chest and inventoried the daggers inside. They were mostly undecorated, although each hilt had been carved with the sigil of a pineapple, an exotic and ridiculous fruit. As we worked, we dodged bats and listened to the twittering of birds. Below us we could hear every conversation, every potato dropped into every pot of water. It was an overload of sensory information.

  We were finishing up when someone started pounding at the trapdoor, and André clutched his chest in what was only half a comedic exaggeration. Lora flung open the heavy trapdoor, a dagger decorated with the sigil of a pineapple hidden behind her back. A slight man in workman’s clothes crawled up into the attic. He was spattered with blood.

  “Rebekah!” I said in surprise. We
had not expected her back for hours, if not days. Lora gently helped her up and Rebekah peeled off the layers of false hair and painted on features, revealing the small Jewish woman with a preternatural ability to look like anyone but herself.

  “My god,” said André, still holding his chest. “Rivkah, what happened to you?” During a boring ship ride she had once taught him her name in Hebrew, and he had found it delightful. Here it carried the tenderness he always especially showed her over all of us.

  I checked her for wounds but she waved me away.

  “Not mine,” she said. “Not my blood.” She managed, with a shaking, quiet voice, to tell us what had happened.

  Rebekah, a master of disguises, had been the crux of my plan. She had joined the sailors on their last voyage disguised as a wharf rat named Henrik, willing to do backbreaking work in exchange for transportation to Hamburg. After the fight, and our successful theft, she had retired grumbling with her fellow sailors to the beer hall, where they had drunk and complained about thieves, and she had continued to gently try to guide them to the subject of where they had received the chest of daggers we had stolen. Our employers, as always, were The Duke’s Own, who suspected that the daggers had been taken from one of their armories by someone sympathetic to the cause of the Green and White revolutionaries. The Duke’s Own were not a group of people who liked being stolen from, and any information we could give them on the movement of that chest would help them string up whoever was ultimately responsible.

  As the men grew drunker, and the relief of another successful voyage settled in, Rebekah felt them getting closer to revealing what she needed to know, but just as she was guiding them the last little way, she felt a surge of adrenaline. She had spent years infiltrating the lowest and the highest rungs of society, blending in seamlessly with every strata, and this had given her a pitch-perfect ear for when a scene was about to turn bad. And, as they chatted in that hall, she felt the scene shift suddenly and quite definitively bad. The door to the bar was kicked open and soldiers marched in, more and more of them, carefully taking positions in front of every possible exit. As soon as she saw this, Rebekah slid under the table.