The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “So…they…did this to her.”

  “Yes. They did. At least that’s what common sense would suggest.”

  “God. So awful. So sad,” Richard found himself murmuring. He looked around the windowless room, at the half-open refrigerated locker from which the body had been removed so he could ID it. In an adjacent room—a room with brilliant white walls, bright surgical lighting, and a sloping autopsy table with drains for the fluids that flowed from the cadavers as their mysteries were plumbed with scissors and bone saws and jugular tubes—he heard a radio. He heard a song. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” He’d watched his father-in-law dance with Kristin to that song at their wedding. It wasn’t Sinatra himself, of course, but the live band had done a beautiful cover. He hoped someday he would dance to that song at Melissa’s wedding. He tried to imagine her at twenty-five, but couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

  “So, those guys in jail,” he asked the detective, “are they talking?”

  The detective shook his head. “A few are already back on the street. And they all have very good lawyers.”

  “But they will? Eventually?”

  “Talk? Hard to say.”

  “Are they all this violent?”

  “Some are. Some are just businessmen. But these dudes—the ones who most likely did this? I would say they’re not real big advocates for the sanctity of human life. Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Tell me. Go ahead.”

  “Well, this all began in my house. The people who did this—they know that. They know where I live. And seeing what they did to this girl scares me. It makes me worry about my family. I have a wife. I have a nine-year-old daughter.”

  The detective seemed to ponder this. Then he raised his brows, and when he did his eyes went a little exophthalmic. “My gut tells me they don’t have a whole lot of interest in you or your family. I mean, they might. As you said, some of them have anger management issues. And maybe if they thought you were protecting one of their girls they’d come for you. Maybe if they thought you were a witness to something. But it’s not like you’re hiding one of their girls in your guest room. It’s not like one’s hanging around your sunroom.”

  “No. I don’t even have a sunroom.”

  “There you go.”

  Harry started to pull the sheet back over the corpse, but Richard stopped him. “Everything okay?” the pathologist asked.

  “Yeah. It is. I just thought I should see her face a few seconds more. Pay my respects, I guess.” He tried to craft a similar face in his head for her father. Someone who would have wanted to walk her down an aisle and dance with her at her wedding.

  “Okay.”

  Her eyes were open, more blue than he had remembered. Cornflower blue. Her hair was the same almost alabaster blond. The skin, from so much time in the water, was inhumanly white and looked almost gelatinous. Blubbery, he thought. Blubbery.

  “Would you pull the sheet down?” he asked.

  “Really?” The pathologist sounded dubious.

  “Just to her collarbone. I want…I want to see.”

  “No, you don’t.” This was the detective. Richard looked up at him. He was shaking his head ever so slightly.

  “I feel an obligation.”

  “An obligation?”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s crazy. But somewhere she has family. Or, I guess, had family.”

  The pathologist glanced at the detective, and the detective shrugged. So Harry pulled the sheet down almost to the woman’s breasts, and Richard’s first thought—perhaps because they had told him how she’d been killed, perhaps because he knew, more or less, what was coming—was wonder that the head had remained attached to the body. He saw only the spinal cord and a single rope of muscle between her collarbone and her jaw. It was like a Halloween skeleton.

  “Those are posterior neck muscles,” the pathologist was saying, pointing with two fingers. “They severed the carotid artery and the jugular vein, which is all it would have taken to kill her. But then they cut all the way through the larynx. And then some. There would have been more tissue left, but it washed away.”

  “So they killed her the way she killed one of them?”

  “Apparently,” the detective said. “But later this morning we’ll do an autopsy and confirm that’s the cause of death. It probably was. No evidence of bullet wounds. But these guys will check. Do a toxicology report. The usual.”

  Harry pulled the sheet back over the girl and leaned against a Formica counter.

  “What happens to her body after that?” Richard asked.

  This time it was the detective who looked at Harry. The pathologist arched his eyebrows and coughed once into his elbow. “Autumn allergies,” he said, apologizing. “No idea why they get to me even in here.” Then: “We’ll keep her on ice for a bit. Just in case.”

  “In case you actually find a family member?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But we won’t,” the detective added. “Hart Island. That’s where we bury the anonymous. It’s in the Bronx. A couple of inmates from Rikers will handle it.”

  “Any news on the other girl?” Richard asked.

  “The other girl from your party?”

  “Wasn’t my party,” he said, correcting the detective. He hoped he hadn’t sounded as defensive in reality as he had in his head.

  “Sorry. The party at your house,” the detective agreed. “We haven’t found her yet. With any luck, her body will wash up, too.”

  From the moment Richard had confirmed that the girl on the slab was Sonja, he had failed to consider that Alexandra might be dead, too. In his relief, the notion had been vanquished from his mind. When he had asked about Alexandra just now, he had meant, Any news on her whereabouts? Any leads where she might be hiding? And so the possibility—so likely in the detective’s opinion—that her body was decomposing in the East River hit Richard like a slap. Of course. Of course, it was in the East River. They’d most certainly killed her, too. For the second time since he had walked into the morgue, he thought he might be sick. The world went fuzzy. He gulped a little burbling acid back down his throat.

  “You need some water?”

  It was Harry. Richard blinked and breathed. He saw the pathologist’s hand on his arm, but he had to look there to feel it.

  He focused on the room and tried to gather himself. He was clammy now and he felt like shit. But at least he wasn’t going to vomit. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll have a glass. Thank you.”

  “You got pretty pale there,” said the detective. “You okay?”

  The record shows—

  “Yeah. I’m…I’m fine,” he said. From somewhere far away the radio had returned.

  I took the blows—

  Harry handed him a paper cup, and he took a small sip.

  And did it my way.

  His eyes lingered on the pathologist’s elbow, where the fellow had covered his cough, and he thought once more of that moment on the stairs in his home when Alexandra had held on to his elbow. He saw there her demure and lovely fingers. He saw her eyes. He saw her dancing in a wedding dress, but with whom he couldn’t say. How—and why—she had morphed from inamorata to daughter, he couldn’t say. But he was relieved. Maybe it made him less…hateful. He heard horns. A violin.

  But with the revelation came a disturbing feeling that he wasn’t, in the end, ever going to dance at his own daughter’s wedding. It wasn’t as visually concrete as a premonition (which he didn’t believe in, in any case), and he tried to take comfort in that. He reminded himself that there were no clichés about men’s intuition. But it wouldn’t go away, even when he tried to drown it in his relief that he had regained his wife, and that Alexandra—living or dead—would live on in his memory as a child and not a whore.

  Yes, it was my way.

  Alexandra

  I stayed in the youth hostel two nights.

  I stayed in the waiting area of an emergency room at a big hospital on the third.

/>   And, then, on Friday morning, I took the train back to Bronxville.

  …

  I went to the hospital emergency room on Thursday to hide. That’s all. No one had hurt me. I hadn’t had some terrible accident. Once a cabdriver almost ran over me, but that was my fault because I was walking across a street in sleepwalker daze. He didn’t end up hitting me, and so I didn’t die like my grandmother. He swore at me to pay attention.

  And so I did. I paid lots more attention. And when I did, it felt like they were getting close. They: the police guys. Yulian’s dudes. His cue-ball-head babies who actually were killers. Even in the hostel it felt like the walls were closing in on me. I had stayed two nights in this lower bunk, curled up in little ball beneath a sheet that smelled of soap, dozing, but with one eye open when I was awake. I slept with my knit football team cap on. I slept with the Makarov beside me.

  And finally, it seemed to me, I needed to move on.

  Some girls at the hostel had wanted to be my friends. Girls from the Netherlands and England and Texas. They were young and pretty, some of them, and would have made good prostitutes. But they were there to see the city and America as tourists. They wanted to see the museums and then dance. They wanted to see the Times Square and then dance. If they pleasured men—and I do not know if they did—it was because they were also getting pleasure themselves.

  Two of the girls worried about me because I was dozing with that cap on. I had told them I was cold and maybe I was getting a cold. They wanted to share with me their NyQuil. To make them happy and so they would leave me alone, I drank some. I think that is when I slept the deepest—and that scared me. But I know I was in deep sleep because I had such dreams. I dreamed of my grandmother, maybe because I had almost died like her. I dreamed of a man who I thought was my father, who was telling me stories of a town called Chunkush, where so many of my ancestors had been slaughtered in 1915, and of a crevasse in the ground that seemed to fall to the center of the earth. But still the Turks and the Kurds had filled it with bodies. That’s how many Armenians they killed there. Ten thousand, at least. And I dreamed of a house in Bronxville and a man named Richard. The two of us were sitting on the edge of a bed, and he was feeding me a Middle Eastern sugar cookie called a maamoul.

  …

  What I figured out about hospital was this. It was super easy to hide there in the emergency room. At least it might be for a day or two. How I found out was total accident.

  I left the hostel on Thursday morning with my knapsack and my money and my cigarettes. It was so early the sun was rising, and it was yellowish-red like welding.

  I hid my pistol again underneath my jacket and I walked east across the Central Park. I wasn’t sure where I was going. But I needed to go somewhere. Do something. Keep moving. I did not know what my destination would be. I did not know anything except I should not risk staying at the hostel any longer. People asked too many questions. Eventually someone would figure out who I was. Eventually the wrong kind of person would find me—and kill me.

  As I was leaving the park on the Fifth Avenue, I felt funny. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention. I felt like I was being followed. I opened my bag and took out my compact like I was a girl in one of the movies we used to watch in our hotel room in Moscow, and used the mirror in the lid to look behind me. I saw a police guy by trees on the sidewalk on one side of the street, and I saw a black Escalade outside apartment building on the other. The Escalade had its engine running. Both could be nothing. Coincidence. But either could be something. When I walked down Ninety-sixth Street, the police guy stayed where he was, but the Escalade pulled out and turned left. Maybe he was following me. Maybe not. I walked to the end of the long block and turned left onto the Madison Avenue and started walking north, which actually was crazy dumb. I should have turned right, so the one-way street would work in my favor. The car couldn’t have followed me.

  But it didn’t matter, because the light was red, and so the driver had to stop and wait. I walked a little faster. I was almost, but not really, running. And when I crossed Ninety-eighth Street and the traffic was again moving north, I saw hospital. It was called Mount Sinai. And in I went. I walked fast like I had a place to go. I knew how to walk around hospital from all those weeks years ago when my mother was dying in one, and from all the times when I visited my grandmother there.

  But this hospital was not just bigger than the one in Yerevan. It was total madhouse—and, for me that day, this was a good thing. A very good thing. The emergency room was like a maze. There were rows of little cubicles with curtains, long corridors with too little light, and nooks with chairs where people—some sick, some families—could wait. There were always workers pushing machines with cuffs and wires and screens. There were always doctors and nurses looking at clipboards and tablets.

  Sure, there were plenty of police guys in the crowds. But they weren’t interested in me. No one was interested in me. I took a chair in a dark corner—it was all dark corners—and spent hours watching the drunks and the old people and even some guy who had been stabbed in the arm. I watched all these beautiful and handsome young nurses and doctors in their scrubs walking from the counters to the cubicles. I watched the families come and go. An old man died in one of those cubicles. Sometimes the patients would be treated and go home, and sometimes they would be wheeled on gurneys to hospital rooms upstairs.

  I don’t think I ever fell asleep because the chairs were not that comfortable. But I closed my eyes. I got potato chips and sodas from the vending machines.

  Sometimes I would go back outside, make sure there was no Escalade, and smoke.

  Sometimes I wished I still had my phone. What if I had made a mistake throwing it away? What if Sonja had been trying to find me? But I knew in my heart I had done the right thing—the safe thing. She was gone.

  And so I was lonely.

  I was so lonely, I considered finding a man. I wouldn’t be courtesan. I would just be friendly. But obviously that would be insane. I needed to stay hidden until I could get help.

  By Friday morning, I probably looked like shit. It had been almost twenty-four hours since I had left the hostel, and I hadn’t showered or slept. My leather jacket probably looked okay, but my skirt must have looked dirty. I was standing on the corner smoking a cigarette, and a police guy came up to me. He was young, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, and he was a little heavy. He had boyish eyes.

  “Young lady, you okay?” he asked me.

  I held my cigarette down by my waist so he wouldn’t have to breathe the smoke. My heart was beating like crazy because I was afraid he might know who I was. I considered dropping the cigarette and squashing it with the toe of my boot, and reaching into my jacket for the pistol. But I wasn’t going to shoot this dude. That gun was only for Yulian or the cue-ball-head babies.

  “Yes,” I lied. “I’m okay.” I motioned back toward hospital. “My mom is in there. She has lung cancer. It was a long night.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Okay. You just looked…”

  I smiled—my best polite girl smile. “I know. I think I’m going to check in on her one more time. Then I go home and shower.”

  He smiled back at me and then walked on.

  I couldn’t hide forever. I had known this for three days. But talking even for thirty seconds with the police guy made this clear. I needed help. I needed to do something. I needed to do something now.

  That’s when it hit me. What I really needed was a miracle, and maybe the miracle was still behind or beside or in little girl’s bed in Bronxville—Sonja’s condom wrapper with a tiny piece of paper with a phone number on it. It might be my best chance. Yes, it was possible it was the Georgian who had turned Sonja over to Yulian. I am not big dope, I thought to that. But why would he? He didn’t work for Yulian. And she had business deal for him. So, maybe she never even got to the Georgian. Maybe Yulian got to my Sonja first. And ma
ybe Richard, the only john ever who didn’t fuck me or use me or hit me or want something from me that he just couldn’t have, would help me find that tiny piece of paper. Who knows? Maybe he would even help me find the Georgian.

  It was a risk, but I had to do something, yes?

  And so I decided I would go back to Bronxville. To the house where it all began.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Before leaving the hospital in Brooklyn, Richard had sent Spencer a text. He wrote that he had something for him and to meet him at Rapier, a restaurant a few blocks west of the Cravat. He suggested eleven-thirty. Spencer had texted back a smiley face. Richard assumed that meant he would be there.

  And now it was eleven-forty-five, and there was no sign of the guy. Richard had taken a seat at the end of the bar—a redoubtable slab of burnished mahogany—that gave him a view of the entrance. He had ordered a beer, largely because of where he had just been and not because of what he was about to do. He couldn’t recall the last time he had started drinking before noon. Just when he was about to text the fool once again, he saw him outside on the sidewalk, taking a last drag on his cigarette and then flicking the still-smoking butt to the ground. Then he was pushing his way through the glass doors and eyeing the tables. It took him a full ten seconds before he spotted Richard at the bar and smiled his way past the hostess.

  “The bar, eh,” he said, taking the stool beside Richard. “Sometimes I like to eat at the bar, too. Feels kind of manly.”

  “We’re not eating,” Richard said simply, hoping to take Spencer’s unendurable self-satisfaction down a peg.

  “A liquid lunch? That’s fortifying, too.” He got the bartender’s attention with the singular ease of a drunk and ordered a vodka tonic. “Good to see you, Richard. Though you’re looking pretty informal for an M and A stud. Black hoodie and jeans? This is…what? Your Breaking Bad chic? Or is this your hausfrau costume while you wait for Franklin McCoy to take you back?”

  “Casual Friday.”

  “I approve. And, I must say, I’m very glad you’re going to be a friend and have my back on this one. Just when things seemed to be getting worse, it seems you’ve come to your senses and are going to make everything at least a wee bit better.”