by Chris Gilson
When the Electric Girl marched back up the spiral staircase to the executive floor, the party guests made way for her. This time, she saw no admiration.
She approached the center of the party where Tucker stood very close to the Kois. Chester was a few feet behind them talking with a group, playing host.
“Chester…” Tucker warned. Slowly, Chester slipped into confusion, then alarm.
“Corny,” Tucker stepped toward her with a look of abused innocence. “What’s the trouble?”
She searched Chester’s face for a strong word, an act of protection. But Chester looked too weak to defend her.
She squinted at the Kois with one eye the way a drunk person drives, because she could clearly see the formation of something she had never seen before. It was a slimy corona that actually moved. It writhed like a spitting swamp creature, slithering a few feet to encircle Tucker’s right arm. The ugly current wrapped around Tucker’s own like a fuzzy brown snake.
She struggled backward now, losing her balance, trying to connect with her father’s eyes.
“Chester,” she yelled, but her voice felt so tight and strangled it came out as a puny squeak. She remembered nights when she would scream for her father and he wouldn’t hear her. She wiggled free from Tucker as he reached for her arm. Her father approached now, brow lowered, foggy and uncertain again.
“Daddy!” she wailed out loud.
Then Tucker plowed toward her, pushing his way in front of her father. She swerved away from him, maneuvering through the sea of dumbstruck faces. He followed her.
“Cornelia, maybe you should freshen up a little,” he called to her in a reasonable voice.
“It’s bad enough you lie to me,” she yelled over her shoulder. “But taking advantage of Chester? You ungrateful shit.”
Tucker shoved through the crowd and grabbed her waist from behind with both his arms. She slipped around in his grasp to face him.
“Hey, c’mon.” Tucker actually smiled at her. “What seems to be the trouble?”
She looked for her father, but Tucker held both her arms in check, his big frame blotting out the crowd. The buzzing of the party guests sounded like a dentist’s drill.
“I went downstairs and found South America.”
“What?”
“You said you’d keep your team working. Why are you returning all the supplies?”
His eyes didn’t even flicker. Tucker was an All-Star deceiver. “That stuff from the airport? That was just a demonstration.”
“A demonstration?”
“Sure,” he spoke earnestly. “We’ll get brand-new equipment before we go. I was just dramatizing things for you. I wanted to show you what you’d be missing.”
“I believe what I was missing,” she said, “was how close you are to the Kois. You made them Lord & Company’s partners. You got them here tonight and I saw a… connection between you I’d never noticed before.”
“You think I’m helping old Han Koi?” He stared at her with eyes as impenetrable as mirrored contact lenses. “That’s just crazy.”
She summoned the full force of her energy. With a great tug of her wrists, the Electric Girl broke away from Tucker’s grip and shoved through guests until she reached the U-shaped bar.
A blow-dried bartender looked her over. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“Never mind.” The Electric Girl works alone.
She kicked off her shoes, and used both arms for leverage to climb up on the bartop. Thank goodness the dress was short. She worked her knees up on the bartop, then stood up straight. Her toes began to move very slightly on the polished surface of the bar, as though she stood on the bar of Lizards & Ladies, wanting to dance. She made up a little rhythm in her head to help her decide exactly what to say. People turned and gaped. For the second time that evening, conversation dribbled off.
She pulled out her neatly typed announcement, now moist and crumpled in her hand, and waved it in the air.
“Chester,” she shouted. “You know Tucker Fisk asked me to marry him.”
Tucker, heading through the crowd toward the bar, with the afterglow of the horrid brown corona still circling his arms, suddenly stopped. How peculiar. He should be bullying his way through the crowd to stop her. But he hung back, watching as though he didn’t want to stop her at all. He stood there with almost a challenge on his face. We’re all waiting, Corny.
The Electric Girl struggled to keep her balance as the room veered off in wicked angles.
The videographer had turned his camera on her. It was hooked up to the Winking Wall, and now every screen showed her picture. The Electric Girl made a fearsome sight, her kinetic hair and eyes burning like glowholes.
“But I think it’s going to get a little crowded on our honeymoon, Chester,” she shouted. “Because I do believe Tucker’s already in bed with the Kois.”
Chester looked apoplectic as he pushed toward her.
“Get her down,” Tucker called out to the bartender.
Now the guests pointed at her like a bearded lady in a carnival. She looked far off at old Han Koi, who smiled into his cocktail glass as though laughing off her false charges.
Chester’s face had turned a blotchy raspberry-and-cream. Why had Chester trusted Tucker so? He had given her his mother’s ring. Chester clung to Tucker the way a fearful sailor lashes himself to a mast in a violent sea.
She closed her eyes, thought about telling Chester exactly how she saw Tucker and Han Koi in their unsavory alliance. She could imagine his bewildered words, “You saw a corona?” Then he would call Dr. Bushberg. This time they might even send her to a place where she would be hopelessly confined.
She jumped down from the bar, grabbed her shoes, and ran.
A man stood in front of her, grasping to stop her. She hopped from foot to foot to confuse him, then sprinted through the postmodern crumbling foyer to the elevator. She jabbed the elevator button and the door opened for her. Once inside the car, she jumped up and down to fool the elevator sensors into closing the doors.
Tucker appeared at the door to the car. But the elevator closed in his face and the Electric Girl was alone.
When the doors opened with a chime, the unsmiling Asian security man in the corporate blazer beckoned her with his finger. His face looked like an angry fist, as though he took great enjoyment in hurting people and had the skills to do it.
“C’mon,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”
She put her head down and charged the man’s stomach like a bull. His belly had gone soft, and when she rammed it she felt a squishy movement of organs shifting.
He lost his breath in one long whoosh like the elevator and fell backward onto the floor, landing on his well-padded rump. He sat looking confused, legs stretched out like a Raggedy Andy.
She ran for the lobby’s side door, which opened to the crosstown street. She turned the bolt lock and pushed the door open. It flew back with a gust of horizontal snow.
The snowflakes had turned into a blizzard.
She slipped on her shoes with the spiky heels, bent forward, and ran out into the storm, leaving little black holes like deb tracks in the snow.
Chapter Twelve
She made it halfway up the first block, crunching and sliding in the snow, before she realized she had left her coat behind.
Well, it wouldn’t matter much now. Her shoes buckled in the lumpiness of the sidewalk. The snow she had admired a few hours earlier now threw chips of white against her face, pricking her before they melted.
She felt unsteady from the liquor. Even though the sidewalk was perfectly level, she leaned forward to plow ahead as though she were fumbling uphill. And she felt horribly cold, wearing only the short velvet dress with a deep décolletage and no back. The plunging neckline that exposed the hollow of her breasts so glamorously when glamour had been the goal now bared her flesh cruelly to the elements. Nothing had worked as planned. Tucker had lied. Something loathsome linked him to old Han Koi.
A
nd her father would never listen to his crazy daughter if she tried to warn him.
Her ankles twisted sideways until she was running on the side of each flimsy shoe. She would like to stop and take the shoes off, knock off the heels and go on with flats. But she knew that if she stopped moving ahead, she would lose her balance and fall. Maybe to freeze and die here, to end up an Old Electric Woman who once had a mission in life but was now cast out to drift away on an ice floe. She plunged on. Through the sleet, she could make out Fifth Avenue and the distant shape of the Plaza Hotel. A right on Fifth Avenue, six long blocks, and she’d be home.
But where exactly was home, now that Tucker seemed to have snuck in and gained control over her life?
Chester looked angrier than Tucker had ever seen him, stumbling out in the snow and snapping his arm away from Mike the driver, who tried to steady him.
“I hope you have a plan B,” Chester growled at Tucker between his teeth.
You just saw Plan B, Tucker felt like saying.
Tucker thrust his hands into his jacket pockets against the cold. It took truckloads of self-control to bear the awesome weight of managing Chester’s company, Chester’s indecision, Chester’s regrets, and now Chester’s daughter. He used that discipline to force his mind into hyper-diplomacy before responding.
“Chester, we can’t both leave the party. Go back and I’ll find her.”
“Damn the party,” Chester yelled at him. “I’m going to find Cornelia.”
Chester climbed into the back seat of his Panda limousine and slammed the tinny door. “Drive up Madison,” he told Mike. “Come back down Fifth from 67th to see if she’s headed home.”
Tucker watched the car crunch away in the slush, fishtailing. As usual, Chester blamed him for Corny’s behavior. It made him feel, just for a second, hot indignation even with the cold and sleet against his face. To Chester, it would look as though he had fumbled the ball, and Cornelia had sent him sprawling in the mud.
Funny, he thought, how he could get his pride hurt even when he was the one who had just passed the forty-yard line with the ball.
All Cornelia had done was make the game more interesting. Now Chester would be forced to send her away for treatment. Confinement. Isolation. Treatment by a psychiatric staff. Tucker knew only one thing about doctors, they loved money. But with the insurance companies putting the screws to them, a lot of doctors weren’t raking it off the table the way they used to. He knew that he could find a psychiatrist he could persuade to see things his way, once he found out who the players were.
Tucker blocked a stooped-over businessman slogging toward him, throwing the older man off balance and propping him up just before he fell.
“Did a blond girl with no coat go by you?” Tucker shouted into his face.
“I remember her.” The man’s teeth chattered. “I think she called me a ‘fucker.’”
No, that would be me, Tucker thought, releasing the man to slide on the ice. There weren’t any cabs and she didn’t have much of a head start. So he plunged ahead, jogging into the blizzard. By the end of the block, he could make out a shape some distance ahead, frail and unsteady. She would be going home. She had no money, no other place to go.
But this time it would be a short stay. He would get Chester to pack her off in a matter of days.
Who could argue against that now?
Roni Dubrov wore a uniform for her job, and it made her look like an old English chimney sweep from Oliver Twist’s time.
She always dressed in a long black wool coat with peaked lapels, her long, curly black hair spilling over the shoulders. In her black top hat, her height exceeded six and a half feet and awed the tourists on Fifth Avenue. Now her hat and the shoulders of her jacket were dusted in a coat of white, piling up steadily even as the wet snow evaporated.
Roni worked seventy hours a week as a horse-carriage driver. She squired tourists through Central Park in one of the few hansom cabs that offered the cover of a landau roof. Her carriage had been constructed back in 1903 when craftsmanship mattered. White lacquer and red-leather seats made it the showiest of the numerous carriages that usually lined Grand Army Plaza, where Fifth Avenue met Central Park South and haughty old buildings like the Bergdorf Goodman store and the Sherry Netherland Hotel still reigned.
Most impressive of all, the famous Plaza Hotel looked as grand to Roni as a European palace. Tourists dressed in baseball caps and running shoes flocked to get a look at this great hotel they’d all seen in movies. And the most romantic tourists took horse-drawn carriage rides through the park.
She had just driven two young couples, Plaza Hotel guests, for three hours from Central Park to Gramercy Park and back again. But then they got caught in the blizzard, and she had barely managed to bring them back to the Plaza through the slush and wind-driven snow. She neatened up the cab, getting ready to take her horse, Peggy, back to the stable. The only people left on the sidewalks were the ragtag homeless. She called them “scarecrows” because they wore tattered clothes and scared the hell out of the tourists, yelling in their faces demanding money.
Other hansom drivers went home when it snowed. Roni stayed on. At home, she had served as an officer with the Israeli army. She could abide discomfort. If she held her position in the snow, she could always expect some crazy couple to want to ride through the park cuddled together under the heavy wool blanket she kept in back. That’s why Roni bought the hansom with the roof. She was maximizing her utilization of the cab, exactly as she’d learned studying management for a year at Technion University in Jerusalem.
Peggy wore blinders, because Roni believed that Peggy thought more like a car than a horse. With the blinders on, he would stay in one lane, stop for red lights, and stay exactly one car length behind other vehicles, as though he had studied the New York Motor Vehicle Code. True, Peggy revealed a mean streak now and then, and nipped Roni. But they got along. She gave him the name Peggy after a song by Little Peggy March called “I Will Follow Him,” a private joke to cheer her up when she first moved to New York.
It was perhaps the loneliest city on earth for a single woman. With all the beautiful, successful women and so many gay men, it left a girl with few prospects.
“Home, Peggy,” Roni ordered from her high driver’s seat. The chestnut horse jerked gratefully and started from the curb, heading west toward his stable.
Then she saw a single, pitiful scarecrow staggering against the blizzard on Fifth Avenue. The shape of the stumbling creature got her attention. Usually when she tried to help scarecrows, they just screamed at her to go away. But this one looked different. She peered through the snow to see a young girl trying to run on the sides of her shoes, her legs buckling. She wore a short dress. And she had no coat. Oh, well.
“Cluck, cluck,” she repeated. “Home, Peggy.”
Then she saw the girl collapse on the sidewalk. She could die there. Roni heaved a brooding sigh because it would take time and make Peggy difficult. But during the holiday season especially, it wouldn’t kill her to help.
“Peggy, whoa,” she ordered.
Westward bound by habit, the horse turned toward her in disbelief.
“Whoa!” Roni told him sharply.
Peggy stopped with an irate snort. Roni stepped down from her driver’s seat into the snow, and took long strides in her stovepipe pants. In the gutter of Fifth Avenue at 59th Street, the scarecrow was trying to pick herself up.
“Are you all right?” Roni shouted.
The scarecrow lifted her head, and Roni saw a frightened young woman who didn’t belong on the street. The girl’s delicate features and skin, now raw, looked well cared for.
“Upsy daisy,” Roni said, scooping the girl up. Her ruined dress probably cost what Roni made in four months. “Where do you live?”
“I can’t go home.” The girl’s light blue lips quivered. “They’ll put me away.”
With good reason, Roni thought. But maybe things weren’t as they appeared. Perhaps her husband
beat her and she was running away from him. The girl looked desperate enough.
“Do you want me to call the police?” she asked.
“Oh, no. Look, I’m sorry,” the girl’s white teeth clattered. Then she began crying, her skin slowly turning from red to a more disturbing blue.
“Listen to me,” Roni barked in her army officer’s voice, pitched sharp enough to startle arrogant young Israeli men. “I will drive you home and we’ll see what’s what. Where do you live?”
“Eight-forty Fifth, at 65th Street.”
Roni knew the building, a very rich person’s building. More than just rich. A classy building. A lost slip of a girl who lived in a magnificent building. Then she saw the diamond ring as big as a crab apple reflecting from a streetlight. She thought of other people who could find this girl, rob her of the gem without any shame at all, and leave her to freeze on the street.
She used her lean muscles to heft the girl, and carried her across the street. Lifting her into the back seat of her carriage, she bundled her up in the heavy plaid lap robe.
“I’m going to drive you home,” she yelled, deciding to take Fifth Avenue against the traffic. She might get into trouble if a cop stopped her. But this was an emergency.
“Peggy, turn,” she shouted. The horse balked at first, but Roni yanked the reins, a battle of wills.
Peggy started the wrong way up Fifth. Roni imagined how troubled Peggy would be to see the long stone wall of Central Park now on his left, when he knew it was supposed to be on his right. He would perform this senseless duty for her, but might pay her back with a nip delivered days later when she didn’t expect it. When they returned to the stable, she would make amends and give Peggy a sugar treat as well as a hug around the strong muscles of his neck. He would deserve it.
Lifting his ears peevishly, Peggy worked up to a steady trot.
The Panda limousine spun out a few feet at the corner of 67th Street, heading downtown on Fifth.
“Slow down, Mike,” Chester shouted, the glass partition muffling his voice. The Panda drove atrociously in snow, bucking from side to side like a covered wagon. Fifth Avenue seemed especially treacherous.