I envy how happy she is with others, with the entire world.
No, the problem isn’t her—it’s me. She’s easy with everyone, and I’m completely uneasy with her. I can’t stop thinking of her lips, her laugh, the way my palms ache to touch her. I’m out in the freezing cold, and she’s the only source of warmth… and I can’t get any closer.
We’re driving to Opole, me in the driver’s seat, her next to me, and she’s exclaiming over each interesting thing she sees. We’ve already stopped three times so she could get out and explore.
I don’t mind except that it’s prolonging how long I have to be in such close contact with her. The cold wouldn’t hurt so bad if I wasn’t constantly reminded of how hot she is.
“It’s hard to believe Fuchs was born here.”
“Hmm?” I can see her knee out of the corner of my eye, clad in some kind of silky stocking, and it’s fucking with my focus. Real bad.
Those knees shift, part, and I have to clutch the stick shift hard to keep from driving us off the road.
“This place is so nice,” she says. “The landscape, the food, the people… I can’t see Fuchs here.”
“I don’t think it was so nice under the Soviets,” I say. “Or the Nazis. Or whoever invaded before that.”
“Good point.” She frowns at the windshield.
“Maybe that’s why he never came back,” I say. “He didn’t feel like he belonged.”
I know the feeling, although there’s no sense of belonging to be found in a children’s home. At least in the foster homes there might have been a chance of pretending that it was real, that it could be your own family if you squinted hard. But in the barracks-like dorms, the dining hall, nothing to call your own…
She’s looking at me like she knows what I’m thinking about. Which maybe she does—she can read people like no one I’ve ever met.
“Maybe we won’t find anything here then.”
The disappointment in her voice stings me.
“We won’t know unless we check. And maybe he’s here because he figures no one will think to look.”
“Or maybe he’s in a yurt in Mongolia.”
I try to imagine checking every single yurt on the steppes, yelling Arne Fuchs’s name into countless tent flaps. Riding day and night on the tough little Mongolian ponies. The endless sky above us, the one the Mongolians worshipped in Genghis Khan’s time.
“I was joking,” she says when I don’t speak. “We shouldn’t go to Mongolia.”
“Because he’s not there or because you don’t want to?”
“Have you ever been?” She’s leaning toward me, her breasts straining against her dress. She never wears anything low cut—probably because that would reveal her tattoos—but her breasts are distracting enough without the hints of skin. It’s the cut of the bodice, the tucks hugging the swells of her breasts, just like my hands want to.
“Um.” My hands tighten on the wheel. What the fuck was she asking? I make my expression still, my breathing even. “No. Not yet.”
“So you want to?”
We talked like this before, when we first met and all we did was walk together. Once she started working for us, it had to stop.
I wonder if I’d have told her about my past much sooner if we kept on with those walks. If I’d have spilled everything without being forced. I can’t say. I’ve never told anyone before.
But with her I was tempted immediately.
“Yeah,” I say. “It seems like it’d be a great adventure. The kind you can’t find most places.”
“This is an adventure too,” she says breezily.
I cut a glance at her. “We’re looking for Arne Fuchs, the worst asshole in probably ever. When we find him, it won’t be pleasant. He might have tried to kill Minerva, remember?”
A chill races over my ribs, pricking each bone. Maybe I should have left her behind. If Fuchs tries something and she’s hurt…
“Did they ever figure out if it was him?” The dreamy quality is gone from her voice.
“He didn’t say when he talked to Minerva the last time. And then he disappeared before she could ask him.”
Her lips purse, a tiny frown appearing between her brows. “Should we be calling her Emily? Elliot does.”
I’m about to say that I don’t care what Elliot calls her—she’s not my girlfriend—and that Minerva suits her better, but I hold back. That would give too much away about how I feel about Minerva. How I don’t trust her and never will.
And then my pause stretches into a new, different realization. I can’t say that to Anjelica because it would hurt her. She wants me to fix my relationship with the other guys, not slag on their girlfriends. Even the girlfriends she’s not sure about herself.
“Maybe we should call her Emily around Elliot.”
I watch her reaction carefully from the corner of my eye, trying to see if I got it right. My instinct would be to not call her anything in front of Elliot, to avoid talking about her at all, but that’s not what Anjelica wants to hear.
She mulls over that. “That’s probably the best thing. Although I think Elliot really loves her.”
My thoughts go to white noise. I don’t know if Elliot is in love, and I don’t want to know. It’s just too much, all of them pairing off.
When Logan got married, it was fine. I was happy for him. It didn’t affect his work, which made me happy for the firm. And then they separated and he fell apart.
It scared the shit out of me. He just… hollowed out. He looked on the outside how I feel on the inside. I couldn’t imagine risking that kind of pain for any woman. Except Anjelica.
But then it got even worse, because they all started to pair off. They were happy, in love, always smiling, and I felt like even more of an outsider. Anjelica helped their relationships too. She was their fairy godmother, sprinkling her magic over their happily-ever-after.
She never did that for me.
“What do you think?” Her gaze is clear.
I think I shouldn’t have any opinion at all about Elliot’s love life. “He risked a lot for her” is what I finally come up with.
It’s an understatement since they still can’t enter the country, Minerva is wanted by the FBI, and Elliot’s looking at disbarment along with several other federal crimes. They’re working things out with the government, but it could be months or years before everything’s untangled.
“I never would have expected that from Elliot,” she says. “So he must be in love.”
I’m saved by the arrival of Opole on the horizon. Anjelica leans forward and exclaims when she sees it.
“It’s just as cute as Kraków,” she says, “except smaller.”
I don’t know if I’d call it cute, but nothing much ever strikes me as cute. When we cross the river into the city, she looks out over it like a kid seeing Santa on Christmas. Jesus, how does she just enjoy everything so much?
We’re supposed to meet my contact at a coffee shop near the university. Luckily no one stops us for a picture with Anjelica as we park the car and walk to meet her. She’s already waiting for us inside.
I don’t bother to order. I take the seat next to my contact, ready to get down to business. Anjelica looks longingly at the menu on the wall—she usually drinks coffee throughout the day—but we can grab a coffee after, when we’re on the way back to Kraków.
“What did you find?” I ask.
My contact, a twentysomething hacker with light brown hair and piercingly dark eyes, raises an eyebrow. “Nothing. I even ran the search algorithm you sent twice. If he’s here, the cameras haven’t caught him.”
She pushes her laptop across to me so I can see what she’s done.
“Cameras?” Anjelica asks. “And am I allowed to introduce myself?”
“Anjelica, Zuzanna. Zuzanna, Anjelica.” I start to scroll through the data Zuzanna’s pulled off the camera network in the city. “As for the cameras, all of the EU is wired up. There’s no place left to hide here.”
“Ah.” Anjelica isn’t stupid—she immediately understands that I’ve hired Zuzanna to break into the camera network and search for any pictures of Fuchs from the past few weeks. I wrote the facial recognition program she used myself, so I know it’s pretty damn good.
It’s also found nothing.
I tweak some parameters, set it to run again. I don’t ask permission, because Zuzanna knows I pay well enough that she can let me do whatever I want with her laptop.
When I look up again, they’re gone.
My heart does this sort of nauseating lurch. Anjelica can’t be lost. How will I find her again?
When I see her in the line with Zuzanna, my lungs fill with cool air. The two of them have their heads together like old friends, and Zuzanna points to the menu like she’s explaining it to Anjelica. They come back with coffees and at least three plates of pastries.
We haven’t even had lunch and Anjelica’s already on dessert.
She sets a mug of coffee in front of me. “So you can keep up your strength.”
I stare at it and the plates of sweets. My program is going to finish running in a few seconds, but Anjelica’s not going to be done by then.
She offers me something that looks like a donut. “Pączki?”
Zuzanna giggles at her pronunciation.
“We’re almost done here.” I frown.
Anjelica takes a bite and moans in appreciation. “You sure you don’t want one?”
There’s a tiny bit of melted sugar at the corner of her mouth. My own tongue reaches out, touches the exact corner of my own lips. But there’s no sugar there.
When I do that, Anjelica covers her mouth. “Sorry.” When her hand drops, the sugar is gone.
I missed her licking it off. Fuck.
“Do you want me to pull more images off the camera network?”
Zuzanna’s question drags me out of my idiotic thoughts. “No.” Her laptop chimes, telling me my program is finished. And there’re no hits. I sigh and push it back toward Zuzanna. “He’s not here. Thank you though. Usual payment method?”
Zuzanna nods as Anjelica’s eyes go wide. “That’s it? We’re done? You came all this way just for that?”
I get up from the table. “Do they have to-go boxes? And yes, I needed to see what she pulled off the cameras, and I had to tweak the algorithm in person. This laptop has never once been connected to the internet, and it never will be.”
Zuzanna tucks the machine into her backpack. “I can ask about the boxes.”
“Wait.” The command in Anjelica’s voice has us both freezing. “You had me come along to provide insight. Well, my gut tells me this is all too quick. Fuchs knows the city is covered in cameras. So if he’s here, he’d avoid them.”
“Yes, but that’s impossible to do,” Zuzanna says.
I know she’s right, but Anjelica’s latched onto something. My niggling doubts maybe.
“We should at least go see his childhood home,” Anjelica says. “What if one of the neighbors recognized him when your cameras didn’t?”
She has a point. But that means finding the neighbors and speaking to them. Not just flipping through camera images on the computer.
“I can take you to his childhood home,” Zuzanna offers.
“You know where it is?” Anjelica asks.
Zuzanna shrugs. “He’s famous here.”
Anjelica makes an amused noise. “Well, he’s infamous where we’re from.”
“All right,” I say. “Let’s go then.”
Somehow I know Fuchs isn’t here. It’s not the cameras or the results from the search program—it’s more of a lack of prickling on my skin. Irrational, inexplicable, and completely psychosomatic, but still present. Or rather, not.
I’m going to find Fuchs, but it won’t be here.
Chapter 9
We’ve found the house—a modest, one-story structure in a part of town known as Polska Nowa Wieś—and we’ve even found some neighbors. Specifically, an elderly man who very much remembers the Fuchses.
“They were always a bit”—he twists his finger through the air to mime something floating away—“above it all, I suppose.”
He’s telling us this in heavily accented English. When Zuzanna offered to translate, he refused with an offended frown. His English is fine; it’s just taking me a few seconds to process the words through his accent.
Anjelica seems to immediately understand him though. “Is that why they moved away?”
He shrugs with his entire body, even his face getting in on the motion. “Probably. But things weren’t so good after the communists fell. They were a family who thought they deserved good things.”
There’s no malice in his voice—it’s like he’s telling a story about someone long dead. The Fuchses have been gone so long and he stayed, so maybe they kind of are to him.
When people left the children’s home—staff, other kids—they almost never came back. I couldn’t blame them, but still…
After about the tenth time, you learn to stop missing them. Or at least I did.
“But this place is beautiful,” Anjelica says, sounding offended on his behalf.
“I keep my house up.” The man turns, points to the end of the street. “See that pear tree there?”
I couldn’t have told you it was a pear tree—how can you tell?—but I nod anyway.
“Everyone takes from that pear tree. It belongs to no one. When the pears are ripe, you take what you like, leave the rest for others to enjoy.”
He says it like a poem. It makes me think of late-summer days, heavy heat, dripping juice. Bare skin.
My gaze finds Anjelica’s legs, long, slim, wrapped in those stockings. They’re not bare—those stockings are a peep show.
The tree. I need to focus on the tree.
There’s a low fence around it, maybe to protect it from dogs. Or maybe for decoration. Behind it is a high hedge and no sign of what might be behind that.
“That boy”—the way the man twists that word tells me exactly who he’s talking about—“would take every one. As soon as they were ripe, he’d fill buckets with them in the dead of night. A thief. A thief of what was freely given. And he’d cycle to the main market square and sell them.”
Anjelica gasps. But me, I’m not surprised. That sounds just like Fuchs. I wonder if he ever ate any of the fruit or if he kept every piece to sell, all for more profit. Probably kept it.
My childhood taught me to know better than to touch what wasn’t mine. That was a good way to get the shit kicked out of you, especially if it was a bigger, meaner kid. Now that I’ve made it, I acquire whatever I want. And then I can do anything I like with it.
I wouldn’t take this free fruit, not from someone who really wants it, but I bet Fuchs would be out there at midnight if he were here. And not because he needed the money but just to prove he could.
“Have you seen him here?” I ask.
The man shakes his head. “No, not since he was a boy. They never came back once they left. Not even to visit family. Although you’d think he might want to visit his tree.”
“His tree?” Anjelica is frowning.
“Oh yes, he bought the tree—and the land around it—many years ago.” He gestures to the low fence around the tree, which I’d thought was to protect it. But I can see now it’s to keep people out.
“So no one can eat the fruit?” Anjelica asks.
The man spits on the ground. “We take it anyway.”
“Good.” Anjelica crosses her arms. “Take all of it. Don’t let a single pear rot on the ground.”
The man laughs. I think he’s more than half in love with Anjelica, which I can’t blame him for. “My wife preserves them. I’ll give you a jar.”
Anjelica’s face lights up. I notice I’m not included in the gift.
“If you see him,” I say, handing over my card, “please call or email. Don’t tell him we were here.”
The man tucks the card into his pocket without looking at
it. I figure it will go through the wash with those pants and disappear into oblivion. Maybe his wife is more responsible.
The wife doesn’t seem more responsible, but I hand her a card anyway. She presses a jar of pears onto Anjelica, chats with her through Zuzanna, and before I can get too itchy, we’re out the door and back on the road to Kraków.
“Well, that was informative,” Anjelica says, the jar of pears nestled in her lap.
“I suppose.” I blink away the afterimage of her legs, which is pressing into my eyelids. “We know he’s not there.”
“Beyond that, I meant. We know that he’s always had a compulsion to… to…”
“Screw people over?”
“That and…” She taps her bottom lip, which is fire-engine red. I know that it’s a pale pinkish berry color beneath, because of that one time I saw her without her makeup. “I don’t know, I can’t think of the word I want. Maybe there isn’t one.”
“Asshole doesn’t cover it?”
“No. I mean, a lot of kids would take more pears than they meant to eat, waste a lot—that’s normal kid stuff. But to sneak over in the dead of night, take them all, and then sell them? That’s…” But she still can’t find the word she wants.
I see what she means now. It’s a special kind of selfishness, an intense almost jealousy, that would push a kid to do that. Anyone to do that.
I’ve met kids—lived with kids—who’d steal all kinds of stuff. They’d get caught, get beat if it was another kid’s stuff, but they couldn’t stop. This isn’t that.
“It’s fucked up,” I say.
She nods like I’ve found the exact right words. I don’t think I have, but if she’s happy, I’m happy.
We drive in silence for a while longer. And then I hear a smack of lips, a moan of appreciation.
She’s gotten into the pears, and she’s eating them, juice dripping down her hand, coating her lips. When she swallows, her eyes close like she’s just had a secret orgasm.
I snap my gaze back to the road and jerk the wheel, bringing the car back into our lane. Jesus fuck, what is she doing?
My heart is out of control. I can feel my pulse between my fingers.
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