by Tom Wood
As a boy he had longed to be noticed, to be someone worthy of attention, to step beyond the invisibility that cloaked him. He had spent his entire adult life trying to regain that cloak.
He found he had to distance himself from the “newly separated” backstory. He diverted the conversation whenever it strayed back to his ex-girlfriend. He had to make up details on the fly. Joanna kept asking about it. She offered sympathy. She assured him he would find someone else. There was more than one person for everyone. There were multiple soul mates. They could be anywhere. He might find one when he least expected it.
He made a mental note to reconsider using such backstories. Better to stay quiet instead of inventing personal history as he went along. By the time Joanna left the subject alone, Victor knew where the parents of his fictional ex liked to walk on a Sunday afternoon.
“Bet you don’t travel on a bus very often.”
“It’s quite rare,” Victor lied.
“I’m getting used to them,” she said, relaxing back in her seat to emphasize the point. “More leg room than an airplane, but you miss out on the view.” She paused. “What are your thoughts on trains?”
“I’ve always liked them,” Victor said with more enthusiasm than he should ever show to anyone.
She liked that enthusiasm. “Me too. Isn’t that funny? No one cares about trains these days. They don’t get enough love in my opinion. Why do you think that is?”
He was answering before he could stop himself.
She was easy to talk to, even for Victor, who had once had to teach himself how to hold a conversation. He had studied and practiced. It hadn’t come to him naturally. He had to disguise his aversion to other people. He had to bury away his apathy. He had to feign interest. He had to pretend to care. He had sought out interaction because it was a skill, and he needed to practice to maintain his ability therein. He had to train. He had to learn to appear normal so that when his life depended on appearing so, he could with conviction. So he could indeed depend on himself.
Sometimes he was more personable than was prudent. He could never be rude—it only made him memorable—so he tried to be boring, but not too boring. He wasn’t always successful. And sometimes, just sometimes, he didn’t want to be boring. Sometimes he wanted to talk to another person, to engage with a fellow human, even if it was pretend, even if he was never himself in these situations. His whole life was pretend unless engaging in violence, unless trying to kill or trying to stay alive. Only then were all pretenses dropped. Only then could he express himself without a front, without a filter.
Halfway through the journey, Victor put down his book with no intention of picking it back up again.
Joanna had a big bag of mixed nuts that she snacked on while they talked. “Help yourself.”
They looked good, but he declined. There was no reason to be suspicious of her—and no way for her to poison some nuts but not the ones she ate herself—but it was a habit he couldn’t switch off, even to maintain character.
She wasn’t a quiet eater, but she wasn’t messy. Victor liked to be clean. He didn’t like mess, except when a few crumbs found their way to the exposed skin of her chest and they both smiled when she tried and failed to swipe them away without him noticing.
She was the youngest of six sisters, he learned, but not the youngest member of the family.
“I have a little brother,” she told him with a laugh. “Can you imagine what it was like for him, growing up with six sisters?”
“I couldn’t possibly.”
“We. Were. Merciless,” she explained, grinning, but with a little guilt to it. “And his first girlfriend . . . Well, let’s just say she didn’t last long. I’m surprised we didn’t turn him gay.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
She nudged his arm. “I know; I was joking. Anyway, he’s married now. The wife’s lovely. I mean, she had to be lovely, didn’t she? We wouldn’t have stood for it otherwise.”
Her accent was from California or New Mexico, he noted, but it was subtle. He expected she had been out of the United States for a long time. He didn’t ask and she didn’t tell him, but some things required no explanation. He did his best not to infer too many details about her—in this case it seemed impolite—but he compiled a mental dossier on everyone he met, threat or not. It was habit. Protocol.
As they were nearing the city, she asked, “Where are you staying?”
“A hotel in the center of town.” He wasn’t the kind of person to be more specific, even with someone he judged to be a civilian. “What about you?”
“I have a little condo.”
“You live here?” he said, sounding surprised.
“For work. But I’ve just had a few short days’ break from it and I want to stretch that out as long as possible, so don’t ask me about the bank, okay?”
He nodded. “I don’t like to talk about my job either.”
He may have had to learn how to converse, but he had never been naive. He knew what they had been doing. How far he was willing to take it, he hadn’t been sure of until now. He was working, technically, but he was always working. Staying alive was a full-time job even if there was no one he was planning to kill. He couldn’t cut himself off from the world—he had tried before without success—so he had learned to allow himself to live when he could. People said they could be dead tomorrow to encourage themselves to live more in the moment. With Victor death was never that far away.
I spend every day expecting to be killed, he had once told someone whose face he couldn’t seem to forget, because the day I don’t will be the day I am.
He said, “Are you working in the morning?”
She shook her head. “I can’t go away and then go straight back to the nine-to-five. Why, you looking to hire me as your guide?”
“Sure, I’m interested in your perspective. I figure you can help me understand the city and the people.”
“But isn’t that the irony?” she said. “We’re only ever interested in the people we don’t understand.”
• Chapter 16 •
Lavandier tried not to move. He tried not to make a sound. He wanted to be unseen. He wanted to be somewhere else—anywhere else—but he wouldn’t dare leave. No one would stop him, but the repercussions would be severe. So he stayed. He watched, hoping he was only a little pale, hoping he could swallow back any vomit.
El Perro had hung his shirt up on a protruding section of piping so it didn’t get creased or stained. A film of sweat covered his skin, making him glimmer in the gloom. He had been hard at work for a long time now. Aside from the sweat, aside from the bloody knuckles, he seemed relaxed. He wasn’t out of breath. He hadn’t lost focus. He was a patient man. A vicious man.
A hammer lay within reach, but El Perro hadn’t used it, nor would he. It was for smashing ice cubes only. He had already gone through one bag, and the second one was half empty. The sicario assisting him tipped away the melted ice from the little bucket next to the hammer, discarding the bloody water down a drain sunk into the floor, covered with a grille. The sicario used the hammer to smash up the remaining ice cubes before he emptied the bag into the bucket. El Perro, waiting without word until the ice was ready, sank his bloody hands into the bucket. When he was finished, the sicario gave him a rag on which to dry his hands.
El Perro rubbed at his knuckles. Even with the regular dousing in crushed ice, they were swollen. He made no complaints. This was his job.
A weak, strained voice said, “Please . . .”
Heloise’s chief of security was a former member of Guatemala’s special forces. He was never referred to by any name other than El Perro. He was a short man, shorter than Lavandier and Heloise, but his size had no bearing on his lethality. His quick reactions and pinpoint aim had ensured the survival of both his employer and her consul several times. Lavandier was terrified of
him, and hated him.
El Perro stood before a chair, on which slumped a man who would have fallen off had he not been secured to it with cable ties. The man’s face was so puffed up his eyes were little more than slits through half-moons of inflammation. The skin of his cheeks and jaw was red and purple. His chin was both black with crusted blood and bright red where it ran fresh. His bare chest and lap were stained with it. The floor was dotted with blood.
The man’s mouth hung open in a permanent oval because his jaw had been fractured in several places and could no longer close. Had he been able to, there were too many broken teeth and exposed nerves to risk closing. A crueler torturer might have exploited that, but El Perro, though vicious, though merciless, was not cruel. Hence the need for crushed ice.
The man in the chair diverted the slits that were his eyes when Heloise approached. El Perro was his torturer, but the man in the chair was brave enough to look at the one who beat him. He couldn’t look at the woman who ordered it.
She gestured to El Perro, but the answer was a shake of his head. The man hadn’t talked, hadn’t admitted the charge against him because he was innocent and everyone knew it. He was a symbol, nothing more. Heloise wanted a response, and this was it. The man was loyal, fiercely so, which was why he had been chosen. This was Heloise’s show of strength: torturing a loyal man to show the other loyal men the price of disloyalty. Heloise had carefully selected a high-ranking trafficker to blame for the attack on her, but hadn’t acted in haste. She had waited, to give the accusation more weight, to show she wasn’t being quick to judge, so she could claim a thorough investigation had been conducted.
Lavandier was sickened by the savagery but more so by the pointlessness of that savagery. The man in the chair had done nothing except work for a devil in a dress, and though the devil demanded loyalty, she showed none in return.
Lavandier said, “Maybe he’s had enough.”
Heloise said, “Maybe the Earth circles the sun.”
The Frenchman knew to keep his lips closed for the rest of proceedings. He felt no sympathy for the man in the chair. He cared only for himself, for his own squeamishness.
The patron of the Salvatierra cartel circled the man in the chair several times. She ran her long nails along his back, drawing red lines on his skin. The man gasped and stiffened when she did, but not in pain—she only scratched him—and Lavandier stiffened too. He didn’t have the stomach for what was coming.
As if feeling the tremor of his unease through the air, Heloise motioned for him to come closer. “You won’t be able to see from there, Luis.”
He didn’t say that he knew, that his intention was to see as little as possible. Instead, he inched closer. His legs were heavy with weakness. His steps short with cowardice.
To the man in the chair, Heloise said, “Tell me it was you.”
He screamed, “It wasn’t.”
El Perro punched him.
Fragments of teeth clattered on the floor. Droplets of blood joined them.
El Perro had to grab the guy’s hair and slap him on the cheeks to return some coherence to him, because Heloise was far from finished. El Perro kept hold of the man’s hair to keep his head upright. He had no strength left to do so on his own.
Heloise said, “Tell me it was you.”
This time the man said nothing. To deny meant more punches, more pain. To admit meant worse.
Lavandier watched, his insides a knotted mass of disgust and fear, his jaw clenched, wanting it over.
“Tell me it was you,” Heloise said yet again, “or I will have El Perro fetch your sons.”
“Please . . .”
“Maybe I’ll let one live if you pick which of them dies.”
Tears found their way out from the slits. They glistened brighter than the blood.
Heloise drummed her long clawlike nails on the metal table. A hellish, awful sound that made Lavandier’s skin crawl and his heart thump. He was almost as scared as the man in the chair.
“Maybe I’ll have them fight to the death.”
The nails drummed harder. Louder.
“Or,” she said, pausing, “perhaps I will be merciful and merely castrate them both. You would perform that, naturally.”
The man in the chair wailed. He had taken the best shots El Perro had to offer, suffering for hours, yet Heloise had broken him in seconds. Lavandier was disgusted but impressed.
“It was me,” the man said, sobbing. “It was me.”
“What did you do?” Heloise asked him.
“I told them where you were driving. I’m sorry. Please . . . please don’t hurt my boys.”
Heloise said, “You said it wasn’t you.”
“Please . . .”
“You lied to me.”
The man said something else, but it was incomprehensible through the sobs. Heloise gestured to El Perro, who fetched a clean, soft cloth to pass to Heloise, but not just yet. He held it in his left hand, and with his right fist closed tight in the man’s hair, El Perro wrenched back the head so the man faced the ceiling, mouth hanging open, unable to close. Lavandier tensed. He felt cool beads of sweat dampening his skin.
The man in the chair made no sound now. He could see Heloise with a single eye, and that eye was as wide as the swelling permitted and unblinking as she stepped closer.
Making sure Lavandier could see, Heloise reached her long, slender fingers into the man’s mouth, closed her claws into a pincer, and tore out his tongue.
• Chapter 17 •
When Victor woke, he was lying on his side, which was curious. He had slept on his back for years. Decades, even. A pillow could render one ear useless, halving the first and best chance a person had of realizing that death approached. He was half-covered by a duvet too, which was another breach of protocol. Any bedclothes acted as a restraint, if only temporary, and to Victor, or someone like him, temporary was more than enough.
He was naked too, yet another no-no—he slept fully dressed for several reasons—and in that realization the final answers came to him.
He heard her at the foot of the bed. The sound had woken him, despite her efforts to minimize it. She was quiet. She knew the sweet spot where moving faster but louder was better than extending noise by moving too slow. She was practiced. This was something she had done before, and with success, because she wasn’t watching him, she wasn’t staring in anticipation—in trepidation—that he might wake and catch her in the act of collecting her clothes on her way out of the door.
He observed her for a moment, appreciating the curves of her nude silhouette and the way her hair moved, but also feeling a little guilty, a little inappropriate at his uninvited voyeurism. He didn’t like to be impolite.
He cleared his throat and the silhouette became a statue.
The hair moved as her head turned and the dim light caught her eyes. They were large because she was smiling, albeit in a nervous, caught-in-the-act way.
“Whoops.”
He propped himself up against the headboard.
Joanna said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I can see that.”
“You’re not offended, are you?”
“I’m surprised.”
“Are you upset?”
He nodded. “I’m crying my eyes out over here.”
She gave him a look of mock sympathy. “Aww, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“I’m very sensitive.”
She picked up the last of her clothes. “Are we cool?”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to fall asleep in the first place.”
Her eyes glimmered for a second. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised you did.”
He didn’t comment. “Shall I have reception call you a cab?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.” She paused and looked aroun
d while she considered. “Say, do you mind if I take a quick shower? Since you’re up anyway, I mean.”
“Be my guest.”
She collected the rest of her things and disappeared into the en-suite bathroom, saying, “I’ll be quick.”
While she showered, he took the opportunity to check the suite for signs of any tampering, for anything out of place, but he found nothing had been disturbed, nor was there evidence she had used the time when he was asleep to do anything but gather clothes. He was a little surprised. He didn’t check her things because she had taken them with her into the bathroom.
He had made coffee by the time she was done. The suite came with an espresso machine. It was one of the reasons he liked to stay in suites.
She had said she would be quick, and she was. Just a rinse, he saw. She didn’t wash her hair. When she exited the en-suite she was dressed.
“If I’m clothed, I won’t be tempted to stay,” she said, as if he needed an explanation. Or maybe she felt the need to justify herself.
Victor remained silent.
She said, “You did tell me your name, didn’t you?”
He said, “Yes.”
“Would you like to tell me again? Because I may have forgotten it. I have mashed-potato brain right now.”
“Sure.”
She waited, expectant. Her hands gestured for an answer.