by Sheena Kamal
49
Visibility in the room is zero. This could be a metaphor for my life, if I was the kind of person who read horoscopes and believed in life metaphors. What’s affecting me now is more than just the absence of light. That voice in the darkness is a weighted thing, almost heavier than the smell of gasoline. I trip over what seems to be a plastic container, sending it skating across the floor.
In the darkness, I can feel Russo turn his attention in my direction. He’s not an owl. He can’t possibly see me. But I feel his stare nonetheless. One of the guns is in the waistband of my jeans, but the second is in my hand. I cock it. It sounds like a clap of thunder in this echo chamber of a building.
“Oh, you don’t want to fire a gun in here,” says Russo. “I think those kids doused this place with gasoline and set a fire in the basement. They’re probably aiming for it to be a slow burn, but you don’t want to take any chances. You don’t know if they have some compressed gas canisters or something around, just to make sure the fire spreads. A single shot could send this building up in flames. So how about you and I just put our guns down and have a talk.”
“How about we get out of here, then?” I have no idea if what he’s saying is true, but it sounds like bullshit to me. In any case, I can’t see a target to fire at. “We should grab a coffee,” I say. “What’s your schedule like next week?”
“Me? I’m free as a bird.”
“Got a lot of time on your hands to stalk women, do you?”
He laughs. “You know, it’s funny you bring that up. I’ve been thinking about your mother a lot lately,” he says, making the leap from me to my mother. I hear him move in my direction. I can’t see him, but I can feel his gaze. Hear his slow, measured step on the ground. “It’s hard for women to start a brand-new life. They’re so emotional. They always let something slip through.”
What strikes me is his confidence. This is something he clearly has given a lot of thought to.
“Bitches be crazy,” I say. There’s something bothering me, but I can’t quite put a finger on it.
“You have no idea how true that is. I saw you with Dania Nasri. You found out about your mother, did you? About who she was. After all these years she left you and your sister in the dark . . . Any idea where she is now?” he replies, a peculiar, soothing softness to his voice.
There’s something different about the way he sounds.
The last time we spoke, we’d been in Vancouver and he’d seemed lost. Unsure of himself, even. It’s a marked difference from what he sounds like now. When he talks about my mother, his tone takes on a completely different quality. Something that all the softness in the world can’t mask. Something bordering on hatred.
I’m so distracted by his shift in tone that it takes a moment for the question to sink in.
Do I know where she is? The woman who abandoned me as a child?
I have a stunning realization. My stomach clenches, like I’ve been hit. I guess this is how it feels when you figure out you’re bait.
Back in Vancouver his comments about my father started me down this path. What I find at the end of it is not about his military career at all. Part of me was expecting the plot of an airport thriller, to be honest. Some kind of vast military conspiracy that had ensnared Sam Watts and pushed him to his death. But this is not that kind of a story. For Sam Watts it was as simple as a man falling in love with the wrong woman. Full stop. The end. Because he was exactly as he seemed. A veteran who had transitioned into civilian life. One who went back to the country of his birth to search for his roots—even though, to my knowledge, he never found them. Maybe the road was bumpier than I knew, but he’d been trying. He was a devoted husband. Loving father. The kind of man who was nice to mean old ladies and gave houses away to fawning siblings. Could it be that he was wonderful and died anyway? Could life be so cruel?
Could I have been gaslighted this whole time in order to unearth my mother?
“You showed up in Vancouver because you knew I’d come looking for the truth about my father.” I keep the gun in my right hand and walk as silently as possible with my left arm outstretched to the nearest wall. Then I use it to guide me, searching for any unseen doorways. The going is slow, because the floor is covered in debris of various kinds. I step on something gelatinous, but refuse to think about what that might be.
“No. You took me by surprise with that. I thought I’d find you girls and see if your mother had made contact after all these years. I wasn’t prepared when you confronted me, so I improvised. But when I saw you pick up the trail, I thought, What a perfect way to provoke her! You going around, asking your questions. Nobody would deny her long-lost daughter information if they had it. Especially if that cunt is still alive and in touch with anyone from around here.”
There are certain things I’ve lost patience for over the years. Every time I hear the word cunt it’s like a slap in the face with a wet fish. One that’s just come off a bed of ice at the market; a cold, empty carcass that hits right where it hurts the most, meant to remind me that I’m just a gaping hole, an empty space where a person should be.
An empty space, it seems, that fills now with uncertainty.
Something doesn’t make sense here. “So, if you’re not trying to cover up my father’s death, then why did you hire those guys to kill me?”
Russo pauses. “What are you talking about?”
I don’t answer. He sounds genuinely confused. But then who has been after me?
I can’t afford to linger on this thought, because now I can smell smoke. Not heavy smoke, but it has become more noticeable than its accelerant. Russo was right. There is a fire somewhere in this building, one that’s probably being eagerly observed by the frat boy arsonists who have left in a hurry. They are most likely outside, far enough away that they can watch without getting hurt. Too far to hear me scream, if that would matter to them at all.
If Gloria Tate was right, and Russo had been burned badly in a car bomb attack, shouldn’t he be terrified?
He uses my silence to inch closer. I have a rough idea where he is, but I can’t pinpoint it exactly. What I’m hoping is that he’s experiencing the same thing. I should stay silent because my life might depend on it, but I can’t help speaking. I’ve come too far to stop now. I tried to leave this godforsaken city and he somehow found me, this man with the answers to the questions I have about my parents.
“When I was a little girl you came looking for my mother. When the coverage of the hostage crisis started ramping up, you saw the picture of her at the Nasri wedding and you recognized her. Dania Nasri told you where she’d been living but when you went to Winnipeg she was long gone. Why did you wait to go find her?”
There had been a gap of about a year after my mother spoke with Dania Nasri, and my father’s death. The answer dawns on me before he can speak. “Because you were a junkie. You couldn’t handle it.”
His anger is like a blade, cutting through the darkness. “I was still in recovery from that car bomb. Do you know what they did to burn victims back then? They put you in a tub, cleaned off the burns, and scrubbed the open wound to get rid of the dead skin and ward off infection. I never felt pain like that. Ever. So yeah, I had a problem, wasn’t ready to deal with the bitch but I knew where she was. My mistake was I thought she’d stay put.”
“You thought you knew her.”
He snorts. “You can never know a woman.”
“Hmm, that’s so interesting. I wonder if you hate her so much because she knew you were a gambler and it got you in trouble in Beirut.” There’s a pause, so I continue on to the plot, which is what I’ve finally realized this is. There is something of my mother in me, after all. I remember what Samson said back at the apartment in Chicago about him being the kind of man that could be seen as a mark.
“Maybe you owed some people money and they asked you to do a couple favors for them. Maybe it didn’t matter who they were, you just liked the thrill of the thing. Or it could have been j
ust about the money. Who were you working for in Lebanon? The Soviets? It was the Cold War.” My throat feels like it’s being scraped from the inside. I wonder how he can stand speaking through this smoke, but maybe he’s simply used to excruciating pain.
“Was? The Cold War never ended. It’s just on a different playing field now,” he says, but I can tell that I’ve shaken him. His confidence is slipping. He’s sounding more like he did in Vancouver when I confronted him. On his back foot, playing defense.
For a moment there is a heavy silence as what has been just a hunch now takes a different shape. I’m guessing that his relentless pursuit of my mother hadn’t just been some kind of lover’s quarrel. Kovaks had said that Beirut had been a place of intrigue. Russo had been known for his sense of adventure, his desire to be in the thick of one international crisis or another.
As wild as it is, it hits home. I’m hoping that there’s some truth to the theory that even the baddest of the badasses feel the need to gloat sometimes—or unburden themselves in light of a terminal illness. Something Dania Nasri said comes back to me. That there had been a man, and my mother saw a different side to him. Maybe it was more than just figurative.
“She saw something, didn’t she? Something that she wasn’t supposed to see.”
I think I’m going to suffocate before he speaks. He doesn’t make me wait long. We both know we don’t have much time left. Somewhere, within sight, is the end. For me, it might be this warehouse. For him, it’s those lab results in that manila envelope. A life sentence.
A moment passes and I think he’s going to laugh it all off, but then he speaks. Urgently, as though he’s been waiting his whole life for just this moment. This is the problem with secrets. The internal conflict they create. There’s always a part of you that wants to give them up.
“She was a maid,” he says, the words coming quickly, the gravel in his voice more pronounced. “Did you know that? Every week she cleaned a certain apartment in Beirut. It was leased by an American and it was . . . of interest to the Russians. It was supposed to be some kind of CIA safe house. They wanted access to it but never told me why. My handler just said she might be more likely to let a young American in. When I met her, it changed the game. He thought—”
He hesitates here. “When we met, I made it look like an accident. There was a connection between us. She wanted to work on her English, so we kept meeting there on her cleaning days. We had a relationship, if you must know. He wanted me to put something in the apartment one day . . . I had a feeling she saw me do it, but I wasn’t sure until after.”
The conversation with Dania Nasri is still in my mind. My mother would ask who’s listening and then laugh a deep belly laugh. She had also seen a different side to a man who’d been using her. I know, though I can’t say how, that this is the dark, beating heart of the matter. “Put something? You mean a bug?”
My hands skim over something that feels like plywood. Behind it might be a window. If I can pry it away, there could be an exit point.
He’s silent for several excruciating moments. “I don’t know how she knew. How she put it together. She was . . . devious. Yes, I was asked to put a bug in that apartment and she saw me doing it, but I wasn’t sure she had. I guess she figured everything out. Why I was at that apartment in the first place. About a week after, right before we were supposed to meet again, I got jumped coming home.”
“Coming home from the casino?” It’s just a hunch, but as soon as I say it, I know it’s true. So does he. Samson said no one is as predictable as a gambler—and maybe my mother knew that as well.
“Look at you,” he says in a perverse kind of admiration. “I did win big that day, was just going home when I got kidnapped and robbed. It wasn’t an accident. Life doesn’t work like that. They’d been watching me, whoever she’d told about me. Knew my habits. Robbed me, then kicked me out of the car while it was still moving. I had no idea where I was.”
“And you walked into the path of a car bomb.”
I thought the visibility in the room couldn’t get any worse, but it has. It’s so hot now that I want to strip and leave my clothes behind me in a headlong rush to an exit. Any exit. The only thing stopping me is what has brought me to this city in the first place. Despite everything I’ve been through, I still want to know the truth. I’ve dug my hands into the outer edges of the wood panel and have pulled so hard that I feel my nails break and blood drip from the splinters lodged in my hands. But the plywood doesn’t budge.
“I underestimated her. She was the only one who could have figured it out. I don’t know who those guys were, but it didn’t really matter. All you sand niggers are the same. Can’t trust one of you.” He spits this, his breathing coming out in harsh gasps. Whether it’s from the lack of oxygen or something else, I can’t tell.
This isn’t the first time a slur has been directed at me, but it’s the first one that has come about from my mother’s background. Not that I’m too surprised. You can’t be a virgin forever. “She outsmarted you. And you killed my father because you were angry at her.”
Russo pauses here. Like he’s trying to calm himself. I hear him moving, but not in my direction. “Look, it was an accident. I was there to talk to your mother. Way I saw it, she owed me some money. At least. He had a gun. I tried to grab it and we struggled. It went off.”
Now I’m more angry than frightened. In the dark, everything recedes but the overpowering smoke and the sound of his voice. I can hear everything clearly, even what he doesn’t know he’s revealing.
He just lied to me.
“You killed him with his own gun and made it seem like a suicide.”
What I said about Russo being some kind of spy was mostly a bluff. A theory that makes sense, given what I learned from Mark Kovaks, Jules Dubois, and Samson. Until he confirmed it, there was no proof, and nothing to lose by trying it out. The truth is, I don’t care about listening devices, Cold War espionage, or his reasons for pursuing my feckless mother to the ends of the earth. If there was any space in my heart for her, it disappeared the day Lorelei and I were sent to foster care and forced to fend for ourselves.
But my father is a different story. Whatever my mother had gotten herself into in Beirut led to my father’s death. This man murdered the only parent I’ve ever really known, and my sister and I never recovered. No, maybe Lorelei did. In my exhaustion, brought on from days of sporadic sleep, of constantly looking over my shoulder, I realize that she recovered and moved on. It’s why she is able to hang up on me with such authority. I’m her past and it doesn’t matter to her anymore. But I have never been able to let go.
“I didn’t think she’d abandon her family,” he says. “Shows you what kind of woman your mother was. Do you know what my greatest fear used to be?”
I’m breathing now through the sleeve of my shirt. The smoke is stinging my eyes. They’ve narrowed to slits and I can barely keep them open.
“The thing about life is, you’re supposed to have figured it out by the time you’re my age. You’re not young yourself, so you must have some idea of what I’m talking about.”
Now it’s my turn to not speak. He continues anyway. I can feel him moving closer. “I used to be terrified of fire. It got so bad I couldn’t even be near a fireplace in the winter. Or hear a match strike. The scars . . . you have no idea about the scars.” He sounds calm. How can he sound like this when we’re about to be burned alive? “But now all I feel is relief. Maybe this is what should have happened back in Beirut.”
A kind of horror builds now inside me. He has no plans to make it out of here alive, to live a life full of pain and on dialysis. This is his last stand. Maybe it would have been different for him if I’d known where my mother was. Maybe he wouldn’t have trapped us both in here because he’d still have some revenge to live for. But I’ve never been that lucky and neither, it seems, has he.
I can feel him getting closer, but I can’t see much now. I reach a doorway and start to run throug
h it when I feel him grab the back of my jacket and pull me to the ground. He’s stronger than I expected. The gun in my hand skids away from me as I fall. I feel the brush of his fingers on my arm.
He puts a gun of his own to my head. Like I had to the young man I’d threatened back at Nate’s house—like Russo had to my father before me.
The air is thicker here. I can barely breathe. The hallway is filled with smoke. “You said . . . explosion . . .” A harsh, racking cough shakes my body. The only thing keeping me grounded is the cold metal against my temple. I almost turn into it, it feels so good. I can’t see him. He is a voice in the dark, at the other end of a gun.
His voice, when he speaks, is muffled. Like he’s talking into his sleeve. He gets very close, right up to my ear. I feel him now, feel his hatred. It’s on his breath, raising the hairs at my nape.
“I lied.”
Of course.
“I keep waiting for your mother to pop out to save you,” he whispers, taking up what must be the remaining oxygen in the building. “But I guess she just doesn’t care.”
I think of the test results found back at the apartment. And I see now why he has kept me here all this time, endangering himself. He doesn’t care, either. He’s prepared to die on his terms, and take me with him. Because he’s come too far to die alone.
I laugh. Choke, and laugh some more. “You’re . . . another loser. L-like me.” The last word is nothing more than a whisper dragged through my ragged throat, just as it seizes up, but I know he has heard. That he knows as well as I do it’s true.
He pulls the trigger. The gun jams. The building does not explode.
The second gun that was in my waistband is now in my hand. I cock it and brace myself against the wall. Russo knocks my hand away just as I pull the trigger.
There is a loud crashing noise. A part of the ceiling slams into my shoulder. I try to crawl away, but I can’t get enough oxygen in me. Maybe there’s just none left. I think I’m in the doorway. I don’t know where Russo is, but does it even matter?