Seven Shoes
Page 24
The young woman said something in Norwegian. Elizabeth caught only names—her name and “Freyja.”
“I am Elizabeth.”
The bike messenger handed over the envelope.
Ingrid signed and the messenger left.
“We should do this by the book, let forensics dust for fingerprints first …”
But Elizabeth was already tearing underneath the top flap with a fingernail. She shook it and a ticket slid into her palm. It had a long Norwegian word along the top and something underneath. A blue tornado was printed on the side.
“What does this say?” Elizabeth asked.
“It says, ‘MegaJump.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Oslo Indoor Skydiving, good for one.”
“Should I go?”
“If it helps catch the horse-dick who killed Thor.”
TWENTY-ONE
The Uber Black driver was a polite young man with a red Porsche. Elizabeth settled into black leather and watched Oslo go by, the pier, City Hall, the angled steel and glass Oslo Opera House, until they entered a freeway that took them through that long tunnel that bore through a hillside. On the other side of the tunnel they slipped through suburbs with stucco houses and brightly colored flowers. It could have been Connecticut.
Almost.
The driver pulled into a strip mall with an appliance store that announced a sale in large neon colors. Next to it was the sign with the bright blue tornado.
The night before, Elizabeth had perused YouTube videos on indoor skydiving that included some discussion of techniques. She dreamed about real skydiving, twirling and twisting in the air over farmland. The thought that she’d be doing it now made her mouth go dry and her stomach twist a little, even if this wasn’t quite the real thing.
Elizabeth felt as if she could never make herself jump from a great height, even with a parachute, unless perhaps she was in a burning airplane. Maybe not even then.
She thought of Jeremy and shuddered.
MegaJump was a tall cavern of concrete. Parents and kids, suspended by ropes and belays, skittered like spiders along an indoor cliff with plastic holds in bright colors. Deeper into the store was a tall cylinder of glass with two floating figures inside.
A store attendant, a young blonde, somehow sized up Elizabeth as an American before she said a word.
“Welcome to MegaJump,” the girl said.
Elizabeth presented her ticket.
“Your friend is already in the chamber,” she said.
“My friend?”
“Yes, he is right there,” she pointed to the large glass rectangle. Elizabeth squinted, trying to identify the two men in red jumpsuits and black helmets as they bobbed up and down in a torrent of upward moving air.
Is Freyja here?
Elizabeth looked around, at the crowd of onlookers, mostly teens and their parents. She studied the climbers, other store attendants, and people coming in and out of the bathroom.
Elizabeth wanted to be sure this place was safe, that if Freyja was skydiving in front of her that she would not be harmed or kidnapped by some confederate. As she got closer to the glass wall, Elizabeth slid her hand into her purse and slowly retracted her smartphone.
Japanese electric dance music beat from speakers, providing a theme to the movements of the sky divers. It was loud but failed to mask the jet engine sound of air as it rushed upward through a trampoline-like floor.
Elizabeth glanced down at her phone and pushed a button that would call Lars.
She edged up to the glass. The two men rose and fell, gaining and losing height and gaining it again as they extended their arms and legs and molded the angles of their bodies to the air stream. One man was obviously an instructor, making hand signals and reaching out to adjust the other man’s positioning of his arms and legs.
The customer was a well-built man, the muscles of his arms and legs apparent through the suit. Strings of blond hair poked out the sides and back of his helmet. All she saw of his face was the oval of his mouth as his lips flapped in the air, baring bright, white teeth.
Elizabeth listened to her phone, waiting for Lars to answer.
She heard the “vzzzzt” sound of a phone close by on vibrate. It came from a black, Swiss Army backpack set along the outside of the glass tunnel.
Elizabeth looked around to make sure no one was watching her, crouched down and lifted the phone from the backpack.
The man in the tunnel noticed her, pivoted her way and smiled.
Lars.
He made eye contact then lost his balance and tumbled over, righting himself by extending his arms and legs in a perfect ‘X.’ The attendant gave him two thumbs up.
After a few minutes, the wind tunnel powered down and Lars and his instructor gently descended to the floor.
Lars looked pleased with himself, his helmet in the crook of his arm, his blonde hair a swirling mess. He took her off to the side, away from the crowd.
“Lars, you bastard. The attendant told me someone I knew was here. You can imagine—”
“That should make you all even gladder to see me.”
“How did you know? Ingrid? Of course.”
“And I am not the only one.”
Elizabeth looked around and realized that Inspector Dahl was behind her in jeans and a sweater, gazing at her smartphone as if she were checking on email. In actuality, the detective was regularly sweeping the room, capturing the faces of everyone there.
“And you think Freyja won’t see through your subterfuge?” Elizabeth asked.
“Worth a shot. We tried to track back through the delivery girl and the purchase of the ticket, but Freyja always covers her tracks.”
“It must be a drag following so many dead ends.”
“She will make a mistake eventually. In the meantime, I have plenty of PST detectives assigned to this case to do the donkey work. Time to suit up, girl.”
Elizabeth went to an attendant, who spied her tall and athletic figure and sized her up as a ladies’ medium. Elizabeth folded her clothes in a locker. The red jumpsuit was clean and snug. She was given a pair of ear plugs in a plastic bag. She inserted them in her ears and slipped a black helmet over her head. It was tightfitting, like a motorcycle helmet, with clear plastic goggles.
The instructor was a muscular young man with a swarthy complexion and caramel hair that some Norwegians had. He had a big smile and waved.
“Have you done this before?” he asked.
“Only on YouTube,” she said.
The enormous fans above them roared, propelling the column of air upward from the trampoline floor. Elizabeth pulled down her plastic visor from her helmet.
“First, I want you to take my hand, get down on one knee and slowly extend into the chamber,” he said, shouting to be heard. “Then we will gently step forward and let the air lift us up.”
Elizabeth was aware of a crowd around them. She was grateful now that Dahl was about, although it was far more likely that Freyja was present only as a disembodied watcher through the closed-circuit cameras inside the chamber.
Even through the heavy helmet pads and ear plugs, Elizabeth’s ears rang from the thunderous roar. She took the instructor’s hand, leaned forward and felt her whole body lighten as her uniform billowed and she lifted into the air.
Elizabeth shrieked with surprise and delight.
The instructor tugged at her arm and showed her how to make an X out of her body and scissor her way into the middle of the air column. She followed him to the center and took his hand, floating a good yard above the floor.
She moved her right hand inward, just a few inches, a perfectly spontaneous movement. In an instant, the airflow around her body changed and her left hand snapped away from the instructor. Elizabeth zoomed upward, a surprise that made her heart hammer. Elizabeth had the presence of mind to spread herself out and stabilize, and came to float almost ten feet above the floor.
The instructor grinned at her, pleased that she hadn’t panicked and overcorrected.
He retracted his arms slightly and came parallel to her.
The instructor floated away from her, lowered his left elbow while raising the right. He began to gently spin to the left.
Elizabeth tried it, but began to spin out of control. She stretched out her limbs again and stabilized.
The instructor smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.
She did a slow spin to the left and stopped. Then she made a spin to the right.
The instructor winked at her and she watched him extend his legs and pull his arms to his chest and begin to move forward.
Elizabeth tried it and in an instant almost kissed the glass in front of her.
The instructor extended his arms and pulled his legs in, immediately retracting toward the back wall.
Elizabeth tried it.
The instructor extended his arms and legs, cupped his chest outward and rose to the very top of the chamber.
Elizabeth followed his example and soon found herself fifteen feet above the floor, the harsh lights of phones from onlookers capturing her performance.
The instructor reduced his body surface by pulling his chest in and bringing his arms closer to his torso. Elizabeth followed his example, and came down in a gentle decline to three feet above the floor.
She cupped her chest and extended her arms and flew up to the ceiling in a violent rush.
The instructor whipped his head up to see her from the floor, not at all pleased.
Elizabeth smiled at him in apology, pulled her arms inward and gently descended.
For the next fifteen minutes, she practiced all these moves. At the end of her session, she hovered at about eight feet above the floor, experimenting with tiny movements, slight deflections of her shoulder muscles, her arms, her outstretched hands, to get a feel for how they sculpted the air and altered her movements.
When it was over, she looked at up at the camera at the top of the cylinder.
Did you see all that Freyja, you fucking bitch?
After she finished changing back into her clothes, Lars was waiting for her.
“Would you like to get some lunch with me?” he said.
“Only if it’s room service,” Elizabeth replied.
___________
Elizabeth rested her head on his chest, content to be quiet. Lars finally broke the silence.
“We never did order anything.”
“Room service is too expensive,” she replied.
“So this was all just a ruse just to get me into bed?”
Elizabeth lifted her head just enough look him in the eye.
“No, you showing up at the MegaJump was a ruse to get me into bed.”
She put her head back down and felt Lars laugh as much as she heard it, a deep rumble in his chest.
“I could say it was police business, but in truth you have me there. You do seem susceptible to seduction after athletic events.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“Something about confidence, I would guess,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“If athleticism makes me confident, then based on what just happened, I should now be very confident indeed. You never lack for confidence, do you?”
“No, I guess I never do.”
Elizabeth turned her head to face him again, her chin digging into his ribs.
“Same with Nasrin. She is the most confident person I think I’ve ever met.”
Elizabeth noticed an ever-so slight tremor in the corner of Lars’ right eye when she voiced that name.
“Yes, I suppose she is.”
“You really don’t like her.”
“And you really do?”
“No … yes … but not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like this.”
“I am glad to hear it, Elizabeth.”
“But let’s be clear about us,” she said. “These are early days for you and me. We should not get too far ahead of ourselves, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Let us just take this gently and see where it takes us. Does that work for you?”
“Yes, early days,” Lars said. “And besides, we may discover that we are both divorced and single for a reason.”
___________
Daryl Parnell scooped ice chips with a plastic spoon from the cup a nurse had brought him and gently fed them to his wife.
“There, honey.”
The chips would rest on her sealed lips for a moment, saturate into deep crevices in her parched skin. When the ice had melted into a pool, she would open her mouth and take a painful swallow.
Her eyes were half-moons trying to peek from behind a black cloud. From what he could see, Emma seemed to regard her husband with a kind of languid adoration, a look that reminded Daryl—he didn’t like the comparison, but it came to mind anyway—of the eyes of their dog, Lucy, when the vet had started to put her down.
Emma was in a twilight state, the doctors called it. Daryl reckoned it a simple world without pain or fear, without past or future, just an appreciation of each passing moment, as if his wife—the most unlikely Buddhist he had ever known—had suddenly become a Zen master. Her life had now become one eternal now, a shadow play she followed from moment through moment through a morphine haze.
Of course, it had not always been like that. From the diagnosis—GBM, as the doctors called glioblastoma—through the chemo and until recently, Emma was alert and hyperactive, trying to cram years’ worth of work, love and life into her final months.
The busyness helped, but tension and fear had pinched the corners of her mouth and kept her shoulders high. She radiated anxiety even when she tried to reassure the children. Many nights Emma curled up and gave into violent crying, giving into grief for the years she would miss with her husband and children.
He had tried to comfort her, but every word sounded false and patronizing. So Daryl gave up talking to his wife and just held her, stroked her hair, spooning his body around hers like they did when they were newlyweds.
There were visits to the church, spiritual counseling, healing hands ministries and prayer groups. Emma needed it, advocated for it, booked these activities on their shared calendar. But she never seemed to approach any of it with anything close to a spirit of hopefulness.
“This is it, hon,” she had said to him more than once, “and there’s no dancin’ around it.”
Just before admittance to the hospice, Emma had chosen plots for the two of them and planned her funeral right down to what she would wear and the hymns to be sung.
Daryl fed his wife more ice chips. Emma watched him dreamily, closed her eyes and turned away from him to sleep.
He felt tired, propped a pillow on the armrest of his chair and rested his head.
This was by far the worst thing that had ever happened to Daryl—it seemed the worst thing that could happen. But he had known times of sorrow and anxiety before … When his father had been drinking. Basic had been tough, but it had been summer camp compared to Ranger Training. Later, covert operations in damp, chilled forests in Kosovo. Clearing house-to-house in the mud-daubed labyrinths of Ramadi. Fighting in the high country in northeastern Afghanistan on one frigid spring morning, a battle in which he had lost two beloved comrades.
In each of these periods of his life, Daryl had observed something: You knew life was going badly when the highpoint of your day, the thing you most looked forward to, was sleep. And you were reminded of just how bad things were when you regretted waking up.
He set his head in the wing of the hospital chair and fell asleep. The near oblivion of a deep sleep felt like a warm blanket.
Daryl stirred and pulled himself up in his chair and cleared his throat.
How long had he been out?
He looked down at his phone. Twenty minutes. A bunch of new messages from the restaurant.
But the process had continued and her face was now drawn, gaunt, aging her appearance by decades.
Daryl looked down at his phone to see the messages rolling in.
He read the last one from Darius Scott titled “Decision needed.”
He typed:
>Okay, do it. Give her a month’s pay<
The answer came back fast.
>A whole month’s pay?<
>21 years<
Suzie was the most expendable of the ones who were left. They had reduced the cooks from seven to four, and the wait staff from eight to five. People could seat themselves, all that was needed was a sign giving them permission to do so. But Suzie would be missed. She had been, as they say, a fixture of the neighborhood, a familiar and pleasant face, a greeter who knew the regulars by name but on the second reference called them all “hon.”
The cashier work could be done by Darius now that he had stepped in as manager. To make the arrangement work, however, Daryl had to sign over one-half of the ownership of the restaurant to the Scott brothers.
It was painful but necessary. As it turned out, the buyer of the Bankhead Building had not been a hedge fund, but rather an upstart technology company with a blockchain platform that had become the New Big Thing. And such a company, deep in the hippest part of Atlanta, had to be thoroughly wired … which meant the street had to be torn up, the asphalt lifted, the ancient plumbing and old cables replaced.
Then there would construction to completely gut the interior of the Bankhead, retaining only its brick façade, a mask of nostalgia while behind it a famous architect would oversee the construction of a courtyard and terraces sun-drenched by an array of solar mirrors.
The whole process would take six months.
And as construction started, business had dwindled to a trickle. Things would be fine once construction was done, but in the meantime, Daryl had to make his nut … mortgage, insurance, property taxes, water bills, electric bills, garbage collection, payroll and FICA, not to mention supplies of food, beverages and dry goods.