House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  Christine picked up the shears and positioned them at the base of one of the prime roots of the spider plant. Taking a two-handed grip on the gummy red handles, she bore down with all her strength, compressing her back teeth. The root did not want to give. It was thick and stubborn. The effort called out the thin squiggly vein that ran vertically up Christine’s forehead, and she groaned ever so slightly as she bore down on the shears.

  Snap!

  It sounded like a gunshot.

  After Christine finished the repotting project, she picked up the newspapers and loose soil and deposited them all in the trash chute in the hallway. She washed up, then phoned Shelley Tanner to confirm the afternoon shoot. Shelley was Christine’s business manager slash agent slash favorite outrageous acquaintance, the latter category being the one Christine prized the most. A fire-haired woman from Tasmania, of all places. When Christine needed a break from so-called real life, Shelley was her ticket.

  Christine was scheduled to shoot toothpick-thin Judy Starling, the quivering-voiced alt-rock chanteuse who was currently riding atop her largest career wave yet, along with her enfant terrible boyfriend from the group Cody. Or perhaps the boyfriend’s name was Cody. Christine wasn’t really tuned in. Shelley had organized the whole thing, Judy Starling was ready for photo documentation of her fabulous twenty-three-year-old life, and according to Shelley, Starling was “super eager” to add her waif like form to Christine’s modest portfolio of celebrity images.

  Shelley confirmed the shoot for two o’clock at Judy Starling’s Tribeca apartment.

  “I hope you’re not allergic to parrots,” Shelley said, her fantastic Tasmanian accent attacking every word. “I’ve heard rumors of twenty or more.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Just so you know, the boyfriend is going to be wanting to highlight his tattoos. I have to admit, they’re an impressive collection.”

  “Oh yippee.”

  Christine hung up the phone. An hour and a half later she had her equipment packed and was waiting for the buzz from the lobby to tell her that her car was there. She paused in front of the Mexican mirror in the hallway and poked at her new hair. She was wearing tight jeans and a simple V-necked sweater. On a whim, she ducked into the hallway bathroom and emerged with a green scarf knotted into her hair and trailing down her neck.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Car’s here, Mrs. Foster.”

  “Thank you, Jimmy.”

  As she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, the phone began to ring. It was already nearly a quarter to two. Christine leaned into the kitchen to check the caller ID.

  Metropolitan Museum of Art

  They want money, she thought. You’d think five thousand dollars a year might buy me some peace. She let the phone ring and headed out the door.

  As the door closed behind her, the answering machine in the kitchen picked up. The recorded voice of Michelle Foster was tinny, accompanied by bits of static.

  “Hello. You have reached the home of Michelle and her parents. We are unable to come to the phone. Please leave a message after the beep.”

  The long tone sounded. It was followed by a second or two of silence, then a man’s voice.

  “Hello, Michelle. I was just calling to let you and your mother know that your father is an evil man. Right up to his stinking white perfect teeth. Okay? You should know this, Michelle. You sound like a nice little girl, but even nice little girls can sink like a stone in this world. So you be careful, okay? That’s what I want to tell you. You be very careful. I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.”

  The answering machine clicked and went silent. A second later, its small yellow light began to blink.

  The first thing Dimitri Bulakov did Monday morning was fire up the laptop and review the three images he had chosen the night before. Each image brought a larger smile to his face than the previous image. He was happy with his choices, and he copied the three files onto his flash drive, which he then unplugged from the computer and slipped into his pocket.

  “You do not move,” Dimitri said to his wife, who was watching him from the bed. “Today it is me who will get some fresh air. I will bring home food.”

  Before leaving, he pulled the Yankees cap down low on his head and grabbed his sunglasses. At a local FedEx, Dimitri spent ten minutes at a computer and printer and came away with a paper copy of each of his three images. The quality was not great, but the important thing was that it was clear what was happening in each of the pictures. It was amazing to consider that the different activities captured had taken place mere minutes from one another. How quickly everything can change. If the only activity Dimitri had captured had been the first one, Dimitri would have collected his two thousand dollars from Aleksey Titov a week ago, put some of it against his and Leonard’s debts, blown the rest, and that would have been that.

  Dimitri put the three printed pages into an overnight envelope, addressed it, kissed it, and handed it to the clerk.

  “Tomorrow?” Dimitri said. “You promise?”

  The clerk checked the address. “D.C. Yes, sir. By noon tomorrow. Guaranteed.”

  Four blocks away he found a bar that was open. Two of the three patrons looked as if they had been glued to their stools for years. The third was a thirty something woman who looked closer to sixty. She was holding down the far end of the bar, using a glass of whiskey as her anchor.

  Dimitri ordered a beer. The woman muttered something Dimitri couldn’t make out except that it was clearly not complimentary. He drank the first beer fast and ordered another. When the front door opened, bringing an unwelcome flash of sunlight into the dark den, Dimitri’s heart skipped a beat. Of course it was illogical to fear that Aleksey Titov himself was the short silhouetted form coming into the bar. Don’t be stupid, Dimitri told himself. Don’t be paranoid.

  It wasn’t Titov. It was a small old man with a gray mustache and a limp. He took a stool near the door, pulled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, and spread a newspaper out on the counter.

  Dimitri picked up his half-empty beer bottle and headed for the bathroom. He had to pass the unsavory woman to get there. She gave him an uninterested look as he passed. It was only as he was pushing open the cheap wooden bathroom door that Dimitri realized the woman had slipped off her barstool and followed him.

  The door was partway open, and the bathroom’s sweet and sour fumes rolled out like an invisible wave.

  “Twenty,” the hardened woman said. She looked as if she was about to spit on Dimitri. When he said nothing, her look turned even more sour. She held up her right hand, languidly pumping her fist. “Ten.”

  Dimitri sputtered, “I am going to the bathroom.”

  On anyone else, what she did with her face might have been a smile. “Well, we’re real proud of you, Boris. Let’s try not to insult the toilet, too, while you’re at it.”

  She held her look for a moment then turned back toward the bar.

  Dimitri locked himself into the single toilet stall. He didn’t need to use the toilet; he simply needed privacy.

  He pulled out the disposable cell phone. Before dialing the number he had already phoned a half dozen times on Friday, Dimitri downed the second half of his beer in a long unbroken swig.

  He dialed the number. He knew the routine now, and he pressed the numbers to cut directly to the answering service. As the long tone sounded, Dimitri let out a matching belch.

  “Mr. Coward. The games are over now. You will know this when your FedEx arrives. Is tomorrow. We will deal now, I hope. You are not so stupid. I am giving you a phone number. Call it tomorrow night at seven o’clock. You will—”

  The door to the stall swung open.

  “Shit!”

  The phone dropped to the floor as Dimitri leaped to his feet. His foot kicked over the empty beer bottle.

  It was the woman from the bar.

  “What’re you doing, Boris? You shitting with your pants still on? Girl’s got to do everything. Christ sake.�
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  As she moved forward, reaching for his belt, Dimitri shoved her. His hands landed on her bony shoulders and she rocketed backward, tripping on her own feet and falling hard against the bathroom wall. The sound her head made as it hit the wood was like the perfect crack of a whip. She collapsed to the floor.

  Dimitri started for the door, then remembered the cell phone and scooped it off the floor. He knelt down to see if the skinny woman was breathing. He grabbed her chin and shook it, and a low groan emerged from her lips.

  As he left the bathroom and hurried out of the bar, the bartender called after him, but Dimitri kept moving. The old man near the door never looked up from his newspaper.

  Irena was seated at the window when Dimitri returned to the room. He was ranting even as he came through the door.

  “Alexsey Titov is a coward! He is an idiot! Is he taking any of the risks? No! That is all me! I’m not sharing my money with this man! The great Alexsey Titov is a phony! He is the stupid one, not me! Titov is a nobody anymore! Do you hear me? Alexsey Titov is a phony!”

  Dimitri’s Greatest Hits.

  Irena remained motionless while her husband continued on in this fashion. She offered no reply to his outbursts. She was tired. She also noticed that her husband had failed to return with any breakfast.

  The ranting lasted nearly five minutes before Dimitri finally stormed off to take a shower. “I smell like shit,” he snarled, as if somehow this was her fault.

  During his rant, he repeated Aleksey Titov’s name a dozen times at least, maybe more.

  The disposable cell phone was on the dresser, where Dimitri had tossed it when he came into the room.

  It was still on.

  Still connected to the number Dimitri had dialed from the toilet stall.

  Still broadcasting.

  It turned out his name was not Cody. It was Butcher. At least that was his name now. Christine had no clue what his parents had called him when he was a pink little baby.

  The grown-up Butcher wanted nothing else but for Christine Foster to photograph him emerging naked from a bathtub filled with milk. He had done the research already.

  “See? You get all slathered up with olive oil first. Then you sprinkle salt all over your body so when you’re coming out of the milk, it flows in all those really cool patterns. It’s a pisser of an effect. You’ll love it.”

  Butcher was in red cargo shorts and no shirt when she arrived at Judy Starling’s apartment for the photo shoot. The young man was all muscle. And all visible muscles were saturated with a dizzying swirl of tattooed images. Given the totality of the tattoos already on display, it did occur to Christine that perhaps a naked Butcher would not look too terrifically different from the nearly naked Butcher. Even so, she wasn’t going to encourage the boy.

  Judy Starling looked like she might have been one of her boyfriend’s tattoos. Somewhere between gamine and anorexic, the British singer had the large brown eyes of a Disney animated deer. Her mouth was practically a red pinprick, and her filament-thin gold-colored hair fell down straight to her nonexistent fanny.

  She was lovely and strange, and Christine would have been happy to see Butcher drown in his ridiculous milk bath so that she could focus her camera exclusively on the ethereal creature. But this was to be the Butcher and Judy show; the reed-thin singer made this clear.

  “Celebrity valentine,” Christine muttered to Shelley Tanner as she was unpacking her equipment. “Remind me to fire you.”

  “I’ll fire myself, sweetie,” Shelley said. “That’s what you pay me for.”

  Christine let the tripod’s telescoping legs fall to their full length. “If M. C. Escher spoke, I’m sure he’d say things like that.”

  “Sweetie, I’m sure the man spoke.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Judy Starling proved as flexible as a pipe cleaner, and Christine moved her all around the apartment. The singer perched high up on her floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She seemed to hover in space at her Celtic harp. Inspired by the young woman’s supreme willowiness, Christine and Shelley cleared the refrigerator of its organic this and vegan that, removed metal racks, and folded Judy Starling into the cleared-out space as if it had been built specifically for her. The doe eyes looked out from the refrigerator with a plaintive yet knowing beauty. Christine fully suspected that one of these shots would emerge from the session as the real keeper of the day.

  Then there was Butcher. Physically, the two did make an interesting couple, but any hope of juxtaposing Butcher’s highly inked muscles against his girlfriend’s milky simplicity remained that: a hope. He was too big, too physically distracting, a buffalo beside a moth. Christine earned her nickel with a series of shots in which half a dozen of Judy Starling’s pet parrots perched about their mistress as if she were a clothes rack, while Butcher in his own parrotlike plumage flexed his beefy biceps next to, behind, and at the feet of his fair lovely.

  And in the end, Christine indulged the bad boy in his bathtub-of-milk fantasy. Butcher stripped naked without a second thought. Shelley let out a gasp.

  “Oh my God,” she murmured to Christine. “Use your zoom. Do not deny me a print of that.”

  Christine felt ever so light-headed as she clicked off the shots. Judy Starling’s pet parrots seemed agitated as well. Slashes of blue and red and green shot about the room as Christine aimed and clicked, aimed and clicked. Judy Starling stood close behind Christine while she worked, and the little noises the woman made as Butcher arose again and again from the milky bath gave Christine a mild case of the willies. Packing up her equipment at the conclusion of the shoot, Christine sensed that there were more dairy doings awaiting the wispy singer and her tattooed hunk.

  Shelley turned to Christine as the two emerged onto Reade Street. “I need a drink.”

  Christine pulled tight the zipper on her equipment bag. “I don’t know what I need.”

  Shelley’s response was cut short by the ringing of Christine’s phone. Christine checked the caller ID. “It’s home,” she said, putting the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Mommy!”

  Blood drained from Christine’s face. “Michelle? What’s wrong, honey?”

  But the child only screamed.

  Lindsay sat at her desk, pressing the earphone tight to her ear. At Linda’s desk across from her, Jim Fergus was wearing a pair of earphones. A YouTube video of the Who flickered on the computer screen in front of him, and his right arm circled in miniature pinwheels as he air-guitared along with the muted performance. His mumbled singing was not quite as under his breath as he might have thought.

  Lindsay checked her watch. She was timing the latest phone message. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt she might be asked for it. So far it was thirteen minutes.

  Fourteen.

  Fifteen.

  Fergus concluded his side of the video with a flourish. He pawed the earphones off his head and tossed them onto the desk. His face was ever so slightly flushed. “Damn. I think I’ve just discovered the perfect substitute for caffeine.” He rose from his chair, eyeing the intern. “Hey, what’s rocking over there in Lindsay land?”

  Lindsay’s gaze fell nowhere in the room. “It’s nothing.”

  Fergus shrugged. “Okay, spy girl, have it your way.” He grabbed his coat and left the office.

  Lindsay checked her watch.

  Sixteen.

  The man on the message had just started into his flip-out. Lindsay pulled her keyboard closer and began transcribing. The man was in the middle of the flip-out when Senator Foster came into the office.

  “If Aleksey Titov knows what is good for him, he will know I mean business! This son of a bitch!”

  Lindsay checked her watch again and made a note of the time. Andy was just disappearing into his office.

  “Senator?”

  Andy paused at the door. “Yes?”

  There was a curtness to his manner that was unfamiliar to the intern. “I don’t mean to bother you, Senato
r. But there’s something really strange on the messages that I think you should hear.”

  “What do you mean, strange?”

  “It’s… peculiar.”

  Andy frowned. “Has Greg or Linda heard it?”

  “Well, no, sir. They haven’t. I kind of think it’s something maybe you want to listen to first?”

  Andy hesitated before replying. He could not read the intern’s face. But the little questioning tone… She was trying to say something to him.

  “It’s him again, Senator. It’s the Russian.”

  “I see.” Andy turned back into the room. “Perhaps you should just erase it, Lindsay.”

  But the intern was already shaking her head. “No, Senator. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I know you’re busy and everything. But I really think you need to listen to it.”

  “Is that right?”

  She removed the headset and held it out for him. The silver pendant on the chain around her neck caught a light somewhere and sent off a spark.

  “I’m positive. You do.”

  “I am so sorry, Mrs. Foster.”

  Michelle’s nanny, Rosa, folded her hands over her cup of tea. It was one of the woman’s ritual habits. Along with the forlorn expression on her face, the gesture completed a portrait of profound repentance.