Generation of Liars

by Marks, Camilla

  “Rabbit?” I husked into the darkness of the cellar. The rows of bottles glistened like shiny ocean tides from the peak of light from the hallway.

  “Psst, I’m down here!” I heard a voice call back from beneath a grate in the floor. “Come down and let me out.”

  I got down on my knees and peered into the hole. It was dark and I could only discern the glow of his eyes. “Rabbit! Oh I am so glad you’re alive. I didn’t bring a shovel to scoop up your guts in case you weren’t, and that girlfriend of yours probably would have made me use the inside of my shoe.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Rabbit told me. “He only shot me in the foot. It’s bleeding like a son of a bitch though. Wait, did you say something about Vivienne?”

  “Yeah, she came here with me. We sort of bumped into each other and now we’re in cahoots.”

  “I don’t know if I like the thought of you cahooting with my girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t like the thought of you noodling with me, but don’t worry, I straightened her out.”

  “I’m not sure to how to respond to that, Alice.”

  “Don’t worry about it, we have bigger things to deal with right now than who’s noodling who,” I replied. “I take it that you being moved down into the hole as a sign Motley didn’t die last night?”

  “Dead? No way. He showed up back here all banged up. His face was bleeding and his arm was in a sling. I was still lying on the floor in the office, weaving in and out of consciousness, when he got back and had Moonboots drag me down here. What the hell happened to him, Alice? He looked like he had been through a war.”

  “I caused him to get run over after he chased me out of here.”

  “No wonder he was steaming angry.” Rabbit blew out a worried breath. “You shouldn’t be here, Alice. He is going to kill you if he sees you.”

  “I know it’s stupid to be here. But I wasn’t going to just leave you hanging.”

  “Wow. I really appreciate that, Alice.”

  Vivienne popped into the wine cellar. She smelled of splashed cognac and she was wearing an empty box of Fool’s Luck playing cards folded into an origami sailor’s hat on her head. “Okay Alice, I told them I was powdering my nose and I shut the poker room door behind me so they won’t see us pass. Let’s make this quick.”

  “Nice work out there with the sword, Viv,” I remarked, slapping a high five from her.

  “My parents had one just like it hanging on the wall of their takeout place in San Francisco. I’ve had hours of practice with it.” Her eyes trailed down to the hole. “Is Rabbit down there?”

  “I’m here, Vivienne!” Rabbit called back up.

  Vivienne dropped on her knees and cooed into the hole. “There’s my little Rabbit! I was so worried about you!”

  “I’m okay. Just a little claustrophobic down here is all,” replied Rabbit.

  “Was Motley in the poker room with the rest of the guys?” I inquired.

  “No, he wasn’t, but I overheard a couple of them talking about him resting upstairs. They were placing bets on whether he was drunk behind the wheel of his car or if his harpy ex-wife finally caught up with him and tried to run him down.”

  “Rabbit got a look at him after the accident and he said he was pretty banged up.”

  “But not too banged up to still kill you,” Rabbit interjected. “So let’s get a move on.”

  “It’s only a matter of time until one of those guys wonders what’s taking me so long powdering my nose,” Vivienne added.

  “Rabbit, how do we get you up and out of there?” I asked.

  “You have to pop the grate off the manhole and then I have to climb up, but it’s going to be tough since I’m working off a foot that has been shot.”

  I popped the grate and threw down the rope I had stuffed inside the money purse. Rabbit grabbed a hold of it and began the climb. He only made it a few inches before his face flashed into a wince of pain and he stopped, tumbling back to the bottom. “I can’t do it,” he whined, “not with my foot like this.”

  “Great,” I moaned. “How are we ever going to get him up?”

  “I have an idea,” Vivienne said. She grabbed the reins of the rope from my hand and pulled them up from the hole. “I’ll lasso Rabbit up. Just like one of my paintings.”

  “It could work,” I said.

  Vivienne grandiosely swung the rope over her shoulders. The tail of it whipped through the air, skimming a loud whooshing sound over our heads, and then there was an apocalyptical clattering behind us as a row of wine bottles crashed to the floor.

  The aftermath was a graveyard of smashed glass and a red puddle of wine seeping from the wreckage and trickling to our feet. “Damn,” Vivienne cried. “I guess I overshot my aim.”

  “Do you think anyone heard that?”

  “I don’t know,” Vivienne said.

  “We need to get out of here fast,” I commanded.

  “I’m trying,” Rabbit wailed.

  I bent down over the hole and dropped the rope again. “Pull yourself up as much as you can and I will pull you up the rest of the way!” Rabbit tightened the rope around his waist and began thumping upwards, grunting with every step. Vivienne held my feet down while I stretched my torso down into the hole to meet hands. I pulled his body upwards with every bit of vigor and bowel-clenching strength I could manage. “Almost there,” I encouraged, as his head crowned the top of the hole and I drew a strengthening breath and heaved him up. Rabbit toppled over me. We were sprawled next to each other, catching our breath, and I suddenly realized that my arm felt lighter.

  “Rabbit?” I called out.

  “Yeah, Alice?”

  “Do you have my bag?”

  “Bag?” he asked.

  “The bag that was slung over my shoulder.”

  He was panting and wiping the sweat from his face with his back flat against the floor. “Alice, who cares about some stupid purse right now.”

  “Crap.” I rolled to my feet. I peered down into the hole, straining my eyes until there, in the dimly lit abyss, I spotted a glint of light bouncing from the bag’s silver buckle. “Damn it. It must have slid off when I pulled you up.”

  “It’s just a bag,” Rabbit said.

  “No it’s not just a bag,” I stammered. “If you knew what was in that bag you wouldn’t think so either.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Vivienne moved in, her voice intentionally soothing. “One of us can just climb back down the hole and carry it up, it’s not that far.”

  “Are you volunteering?” I asked Vivienne.

  Vivienne didn’t have a chance to answer. The door to the wine cellar crashed open just then. A splinter of halogen light poured in from the hallway and a monstrous silhouette rushed towards us. As light cut against the giant body to reveal a man’s face, I saw the distinctive stalwart jaw and broad shoulders that belonged to Motley. His neck was packed over in bandages and he had a lightning bolt cut down his neck. One of his arms was nested in a tightly-wound sling and the other was balancing a gun on its trigger finger. He shot a stray from the gun and it ricocheted off a cask of wine, causing unwieldy sprays of red vintage to shoot across the cellar like punctured arteries.

  “I guess someone did hear that,” Vivienne said. She was helping Rabbit hobble upright.

  “Alice, you worthless tramp,” Motley taunted, “you can’t run from me.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you call this?” I was already in motion.

  Rabbit and Vivienne managed to clear off into the distance and Motley seemed more interested in trailing me than he did them. I could hear him huffing and puffing behind me as I scribbled towards the door.

  “I used the dynamite stick to find your real name,” Motley shouted.

  The words were a slaying arrow that slowed me down. The echo of him calling my true name, Margaux, the night before, jarred my brain like a sinister lullaby.

  “What did you say?” I gritted the words out somehow, even though my breath had be
en knocked from my lungs.

  “I know your Social Security number. I know your real name. It’s Margaux Fix. You have nowhere to run. If you go back home I can find you.”

  “You can’t hurt me.”

  “I can hurt you, and your family. Your family that lives on Francis Terrace. You’re from Connecticut, right outside the city, not from the Midwest like you told me.”

  The air in my throat seemed to dry out. I could see Vivienne and Rabbit running ahead of me, the keyhole of light from the hallway turned them into blurry shadows in the distance. I swiped a row of bottles from their perch and the sound of glass cascaded down like the rings of unruly bells. “Break your face on some glass, old man,” I snarled.

  The shavings of light from the hallways grew larger as I approached the door. The broken bottles were enough to have slowed Motley down while I broke through the other side of the door. I was still holding Vivienne’s rope and I used it to tie off the door handle to one of the light fixtures in the hallway. I knew it wouldn’t hold Motley back for long, but it might give me enough time to get out of the house.

  I followed the red streaking trail of blood, which Rabbit’s injured foot had left behind as he and Vivienne ran. I bolted past the poker room, which was surging with uproarious laughter, and the guys inside were all too drunk to notice anything. I lurched out the front door and saw Rabbit standing on the front lawn without Vivienne.

  “Where’s Vivienne?” I called out.

  “She sprinted down to the main road to hail a taxi to come pick me up. I couldn’t make it much farther on this foot.”

  I shook my head and let the sting of hot, prickly tears fill my eyes. “I didn’t get the bag.”

  “Come on, Alice,” Rabbit said, rubbing the toe of his serrated, blood-soaked sneaker, “it’s only a bag.”

  “Rabbit, please don’t be mad.” I was trying to conjure up a method to break the news of his lost money to him gently. “I went to your apartment to get your payout from Motley.”

  “Alice! How could you steal from me?”

  “No, it’s not like that. I wasn’t stealing. I thought you were dead.”

  “So you were planning to take money from a dead guy? After you’re the one who got him shot in the first place! Beautiful Alice, that’s freaking beautiful.” The skin on Rabbit’s face turned as white as a sheet. His eyes pulsed open and his drooping lips muttered the petrified words, “My money was in that bag that fell into the hole, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m so sorry, Rabbit.”

  “Really low, Alice.”

  “I’ll get that money back to you. I promise.”

  “Liars have a funny way with promises.”

  A taxi screeched to the curb and Vivienne flung the door open. “Get in, now.” We slid into the backseat and Rabbit sat stiff beside me. Hot, angry breaths fumed from his nostrils.

  “You should get your foot looked at by somebody,” I told Rabbit. “Since going to the hospital is probably going to draw the wrong kind of attention, I know a doctor who is pretty good.”

  Chapter Thirty-six: Extraction

  BEN SWUNG OPEN the door to his apartment, noticeably riled by the impatient knocking. I was standing in the hallway with my clothes and hair soaked in red wine.

  “Alice!” Ben gasped. “What on Earth happened to you? You smell like a cabaret house.”

  “Wine tour,” I answered.

  “A wine tour?” He was skeptical and angry. “Tell me what on earth you were really doing splashing around in wine late at night.”

  “Please, Ben, don’t yell. You will embarrass me in front of the company.”

  “You brought company?” He was straining to peek into the hallway. Rabbit and Vivienne each gave him a shy grin and a wave.

  “My friend, Rabbit, has been shot and he needs help,” I explained.

  “Shot?”

  “Can you please help him?”

  “Alice, that’s what hospitals are for. I mean, I was in the middle of cooking dinner after a long shift for goodness’ sake. What the hell kind of name is Rabbit, anyway?”

  “Can you please just take a break from cooking and help a man who has been attacked? You’re a doctor. You have to help. Didn’t you take an oath for this kind of thing?”

  Ben was opening his mouth to say something to contradict me when Rabbit stepped forward. “Listen,” he said demurely, “if we are causing trouble, we can just go someplace else and have my foot looked at.”

  Ben shook his head, embarrassed by his misanthropic attitude. “No, I’m sorry. I would never turn away an injured person. I’ve just been caught off guard by the situation. Please come in.”

  Ben stepped into the hallway, allowing Rabbit and Vivienne to slip through the doorway. Ben led me out into the hallway and eased the door shut behind us. “Want to tell me what you and your friends were doing when someone got shot?”

  “Rabbit got into a fight at one of the bars in Pigalle. It isn’t his usual crowd. He’s a dork from an Ivy League school. He said the wrong thing to the wrong person. It was no big deal.”

  “What about the girl in the leather leotard? Did he pick her up in Pigalle too?”

  “Don’t be nasty, Ben. Vivienne is Rabbit’s girlfriend and she is a perfectly respectable woman.”

  “I don’t like you bringing this kind of trouble to my doorstep, Alice. I’m a doctor at one of the largest hospitals in Paris. I have a reputation to protect in the community.”

  “Let’s just go and help him. I promise nobody will ever find out, and your status in the community will remain spotlessly intact.”

  I followed Ben back inside. He went to the stove and turned off the burner where a pan of chicken had been simmering. He gestured for Rabbit to take a seat at the breakfast counter. “Why don’t you ease onto a stool so I can take a look at your wound?”

  Rabbit hopped onto a stool and kicked the bloody, serrated sneaker off his left foot. “Can you believe I got mugged right in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral?”

  Ben stooped down to get eye to eye with the bullet hole in Rabbit’s foot. “Mugged in front of Notre Dame, you say?” He passed a glare to me. “What are the odds?”

  “Beats me,” I said coyly.

  Rabbit made an awkward, nervous sound which I couldn’t tell was a laugh or a cough. “Does it look bad?”

  “Infection has begun to set in. I need to get the bullet out now or you will lose everything up to your ankle,” Ben replied. “Alice, go into the cupboard and grab me a mixing bowl.”

  I went to the cupboards and dug out a glass mixing bowl. “Will this do?” Ben nodded and I scampered over to hand it to him. He set it down on the floor.

  “What’s the bowl for?” Vivienne asked. Her long acrylic nails were nervously tapping the countertop.

  “It’s going to catch the bullet after I extract it from his flesh,” Ben answered. He was cupping Rabbit’s heel in his hand. “Alice, go into the bathroom and open the linen closet. Look on the second shelf. There should be a green first aid kit. Bring it to me.”

  “The linen closet?” I asked, with my tongue going dry as cotton. I wondered how closely Ben kept stock of the items inside the closet, since that was where I had hidden the dynamite stick.

  “Yes. The linen closet.” His eyebrows were twisted over his eyes as he inspected the wound from all angles. “Would you please hurry?”

  I shot to the bathroom and took a deep breath before flinging the pantry door open. My eyes scanned the spot behind the towels where I had hidden the dynamite stick inside a box of bandages. It was still nested inside, undisturbed. I roved the shelf above it and whisked the first aid kit by the handle. I rushed to Ben’s side and set it down beside him.

  Ben opened the lid and busily assessed all of the products inside. “One more thing, Alice. Go into the bedroom and open my top drawer, feel around with your hands underneath where my boxers are folded.”

  “Is this really appropriate?” Rabbit asked.

  “Yes,” Ben
replied, “it is extremely appropriate. You’ll see why in a moment.”

  I headed to the bedroom and did as Ben ordered. My hands grappled over the pile of boxers until I felt something hard protruding beneath them. I pulled up a bottle of whiskey and held it out in front of me. “Even Ben keeps dirty little secrets,” I whispered.

  “Did you find it?” Ben called out as I rounded the doorway.

  “Sure did,” I hooted, “and I think you have some explaining to do.”

  Humor wasn’t on Ben’s agenda. “Give the whiskey to Rabbit,” he ordered. “He’s the one who will need it.”

  “I will?” Rabbit quivered.

  “I am going to pull a bullet out of your foot using nothing but a pair of tweezers and a glass mixing bowl, trust me, you’re going to need whiskey.”

  “But you’re a doctor!” Rabbit exclaimed. “Don’t you have any real painkillers?”

  “I am a doctor, not a drug dealer. What do you think I do? Just pocket prescription drugs from the hospital and bring them home for every gunshot victim my girlfriend drags in?”

  “I suppose not. Hand me that bottle,” Rabbit insisted. I put it in his hands and he unscrewed the cap and took a swig, swiping the back of his palm over his lips when he finished.

  “Bloody hell!” Ben yelled. “Take more than that. I don’t want to hear you scream like a little baby.”

  “I’ve never seen you so feisty before, Ben,” I stated.

  “You’ve never asked me to perform an invasive surgical procedure in my kitchen before.”

  “Invasive?” Rabbit gulped.

  “Keep sipping,” Ben commanded.

  “You can squeeze my hand during the process,” Vivienne told Rabbit.

  “Thanks, babe,” Rabbit said. He proceeded to clutch Vivienne’s petite hand with a white-knuckled grip.

  Ben got up and unplugged a reading lamp from an end table in the living room and dragged it over the kitchen counter, where he plugged it in and arranged it like a spotlight Rabbit. “You ready for this?” he asked.

  Rabbit chugged one final sip of whiskey. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”