“Who?” I say.
“The teller.” Terrance wipes his mouth with his wrist. “She got the manager. He said the transfer couldn’t go through, but he didn’t see a reason. He offered to call New York to clear it up.”
“Did you let him?”
“Of course not,” Terrance says. “I left. Tried to be casual about it, but I’m sure, I’m sure, he’s on the phone right now.”
I put a hand on his forearm. “We’ll be fine.”
“Fine how? Without money, we’re trapped here.”
“Good. Let them think that,” I say. “We have alternatives.”
* * *
We find a little telos, rooms rented five hours at a time, in Villa Crespa. We pay for a full day, sliding the cash through a slot in the bulletproof glass of an attendant’s window, where a fat man with an artificial arm takes it and passes back a key. It’s a small hotel, four stories, at the tip of a triangular block. We get the room on the third floor at the very point. A little balcony opens onto a street buzzing with scooters and facing a little park filled with gnarled old trees and the sound of someone playing a violin.
Terrance’s face curls in disgust as he peels the lavender blanket from the bed with his fingertips. “There are cigarette burns on the sheets,” he says.
I pick up a little cardboard sign from a table. “But free Wi-Fi.”
Above us, the brass-on-wood scrape of a bed being moved across the floor in tiny, rhythmic increments. Then the scraping stops and a man howls like a wolf while a woman laughs.
Terrance sits on the bed, staring straight ahead.
“What’s wrong?”
He looks up, face slack. “Just thinking.”
From the window, the violin again, notes bending in and out of focus on the wind, while from the room above, the padding of bare feet on the bare floor. The man’s footfalls are heavy and sure, clomping toward the bathroom. But hers are soft, tentative. She’s at the window now, listening to the music. I can smell the cigarette she’s smoking.
“Paganini,” Terrance says.
“What?”
“The music. The composer is Paganini.” Terrance pulls his legs up in front of him. “My dad listened to it all the time.”
The toilet above us flushes and ancient pipes groan.
“We need a plan,” I say. “In case we get separated, or one of us gets caught.”
“How do you communicate? With Brent? With your dad?”
“Encrypted e-mail,” I say. “A service called ParallaxMail with my dad. Something else for Brent.”
“I use a different service, but yeah, I know it.” He snatches up his bag, pulls out a pad of Post-it Notes. “What’s your address there?”
I tell him, and he writes it down. Then he writes down his own and hands it to me.
“We memorize them,” I say. “Better if we don’t leave paper behind.”
We study the addresses for a time, then I take an ashtray and book of hotel matches from a table, watching the two little yellow squares curl and burn, black smoke rising to the ceiling.
When the papers are gone, I look up to see Terrance holding his camera. He turns it over in his hands, then licks his thumb and rubs at a spot on its surface. “It’s worth a few thousand US. Enough to get you there, at least.”
“What camera is worth that much?”
“A Leica. You won’t get full value, but don’t take less than three grand for the body and lens together.” He holds it to his eye and aims it at me. “You mind? One last time?”
“No point in hiding anymore. They know we’re together.”
“Is that a yes?”
I nod and the shutter clicks. “Can you take selfies with that?” I say. “We should take one. The both of us.”
“We can try.”
I go to the bed and pull Terrance down next to me. He makes some adjustment on the lens, then holds it at arm’s length above us. I lean in close, press my cheek to his. He presses the button. Now this moment is recorded. Now a half-second slice of us, together, will be left to continue on in the world. Now there’s something for the file, to balance out the autopsy photos. Here we were once, alive, eyes open.
* * *
I hit the shop just after five in the afternoon the next day, just as Guillermo the pawnbroker thief is walking out the alley door, fiddling with a pair of expensive women’s handbags, maybe deciding which to give his wife and which to his girlfriend. I call his name from ten paces away and his left hand darts into the right side of his suit jacket. (Note to self: pistol on right, not the left.) But his hand falls back to the handbags when he sees it’s me.
“I need to sell something,” I say. “Very special.”
“Closed,” he says, and wheezes past me toward a parked Mercedes coupe.
“Fine. I’ll take it somewhere else.”
But he pauses, looks down as if he’s searching for something he dropped. “You’re the thief.”
“It’s too valuable to show you here. Inside.”
A groan, a sigh, some more back-and-forth. I’m about to walk away, then he pulls out his keys. Better be worth it, that particular way of jangling them says. He unlocks the back door and nods to the darkness inside. “Go.”
The fluorescent lights of his office buzz as he turns them on. The tabby looks up from the spot where I saw it before, on top of the file cabinets. It leaps to a shelf high on the wall, wanting to be away from whatever happens next.
Guillermo sits at his desk, and I pull the camera from my bag.
“A Leica? You make me reopen for a Leica?”
“You want it or not?”
He picks it up, works the controls, unscrews the lens. “It’s a knockoff.”
“It is not.”
“I know my Leicas, you thieving little sow, and this ain’t one.”
He offers me what works out to $350, give or take. Another colossal screw.
“I want American dollars,” I say. “Five hundred.”
“Three hundred or nothing.”
I snatch the camera up and stand. But Guillermo lifts a flaccid hand, two fingers extended like he’s suddenly Pope Guillermo lazily anointing the deal. Five hundred American for the Leica is the steal of the year and he won’t pass it by. Is physically incapable. “Fine,” he says. Guillermo the Charitable.
I set the camera back down on the desk and he lifts his bulky mass from the chair. The safe is right behind him, burrowed in a pile of laptops and broken clocks and antique humidors that were once someone’s treasures. He makes a circular motion with his finger as he tells me to turn around so as not to see the combination. I do it, and let my ears be my eyes. I hear his body creak as he stoops, the rustle and stretch of his suit jacket pulling taut over his back, and the scritch-scratch of the safe’s dial. Then the door swings open—a raspy, happy sound, like an old man’s single laugh, ha.
I’m over the desk in a half second. Over the desk and seizing Guillermo’s mane of hair with my left hand while my right reaches around his suit jacket and under, grabbing the pistol he carries in his armpit and pulling it free. I drive his head forward into the lip of the safe, twice, three times, and a fourth, because fuck Guillermo. Then I pull him back. There’s a shallow indentation on his forehead, red and purple, a perfect trench running from side to side. His eyes are wide but unseeing. I swing the pistol through the air, catching him in the left temple with the butt. He collapses against the desk.
Inside the safe, it’s just the usual stuff of pawnbroker fascination. Necklaces and bracelets. Tiny gemstones in tiny envelopes. A pistol for those who have to do their killing from across a room. But there are also stacks of currency held together with rubber bands, portraits of queens and presidents and tyrants of various nations on linen rectangles slick with the grease of fingers, and it’s these I’m interested in. I haven’t got time to count it now, but there’s a pleasing thickness to the stacks as I drop them into my bag. It’s enough to get us to Europe and, for a while, put a cheap roof over ou
r heads and cheap calories in our stomachs.
As for the rest of Guillermo’s shit, I consider leaving it alone. I’m a thief who takes only what she needs. Then, at the last second, I grab one of the envelopes of gems and shake its contents into my hand. Five diamonds, not particularly big or special-looking, but diamonds nonetheless. Easy to smuggle, easy to sell. These go into my pocket.
The tabby leaps silently to the floor, slinking its way toward me. It rolls its head against my ankle, then lifts its tail, shows me its asshole, and disappears through the door.
* * *
Terrance is sitting cross-legged on the bed, his face lit orange by the light of the laptop screen. He looks up as I enter, holds up a passport with a dark blue cover.
“My new ID,” he says quietly. “A lady I’d never seen before bumped into me on the street. I was out getting food, and she just came from nowhere. ‘You dropped this,’ she said.”
He tosses it to me—Belize, well-worn, the real thing. I open to the first page, and there’s Terrance’s photo, siphoned from some database, I imagine. Dr. Andre Mason, age twenty-seven.
“You’re a doctor now,” I say.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
I toss it back to him. “Live. They wouldn’t have given it to you if it wasn’t good.”
“Who’s Andre Mason?”
I set my bag down on the floor. “A dead guy, probably. That’s how they do it sometimes.”
He recoils, finding the idea just as repellent as I did the first time I had to share a name with the dead. I sit cross-legged on the floor and start pulling the money from my bag.
“Holy shit,” Terrance says, springing from the bed and picking up a stack of euros with one hand and American dollars with the other. “Holy shit.”
Then I pull out his camera and set it gently on the floor next to the money. The muscles in his shoulders go slack, and he looks at me with horror.
“Is he okay?” Terrance says, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me.
“I’m fine.”
“No, is he okay? The person you took the money from?”
“His name is Guillermo. He’s a dick.” I pick up a stack of 100-peso notes and start counting them. “And I don’t know if he’s okay. I didn’t check.”
His hand lashes out, snatches the money from my hands. “What did you do?”
I take the money back from him, calmly, or as calmly as I can. “I solved a problem. He had money. We needed money. Want me to tell you about how bad he deserved it?”
“Did he?”
“I’ll say it if it makes you feel better.”
For a long moment he stares at me and I stare at him. I know what he’s thinking: how abominable I am, how low I am. But there is no life without escape, no escape without money, no money without violence.
His eyes drop down to the money, then he rises.
“Where are you going?”
“For some air.”
“Stay.”
But the door closes behind him and I hear his footsteps fade as he moves down the hall.
* * *
Terrance tries to be quiet when he comes back just after midnight, but the floor is creaky and the bedsprings old. I roll over when he sits down. He’s shirtless, the white oxford hanging from a peg on the back of the door. I touch his skin, kiss one of his vertebrae. “You all right?” I ask.
He’s silent for a long time. In the dim light, I see the muscles in his back expanding and retreating as he breathes. “Gwen…”
“Look, what I said, I was, I don’t know. High on adrenaline, I guess. I’m sorry.” I kiss his back again, snake an arm around his stomach.
“You’re sorry about what you said.”
“Mm-hm.” Another kiss.
“But not what you actually did.”
I pull away from him, open my mouth, but don’t know what to say. I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry a shitty man in a shitty world got beaten up and robbed. I’m not sorry his money is now with good people who need it more than he does. How can Terrance not see this?
“Yes,” I lie. “I’m sorry about that, too. What I did.”
Another silence. “That guy, Nikko. You know, when they cut him up, they used a saw.”
“You told me.”
“Sometimes, it would get stuck. In a bone or whatever. The motor would—whine, high-pitched.”
I grimace. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes,” he says. “Terrible.”
I try to think of something to say that will console him, a bit of good news. “About seventeen thousand,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Seventeen thousand what?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. Tell you in the morning.”
“Seventeen thousand what?” he says, sharply this time.
I roll away from him, face the wall. “What the money works out to. In American dollars.”
He snatches one of the pillows from the bed, then lies down on the floor on the other side of the room.
* * *
Neither of us sleeps, but neither of us speaks, either. Heavy silence is broken by the sound of scooters outside or laughing or fucking in one of the adjacent rooms. A high-low siren passes by, and a few minutes later, another.
Terrance is right, of course. About the violence, about the rancid person I’ve become, and the rancid person I’m asking him to become. Theft and violence as regular occurrences, like doing the laundry. But to live morally means to be captured, means to die or wish you could. One instance of seeing what it’s like on the other side, my side—Nikko Kucheto strangled, cut apart—hadn’t, apparently, been enough to convince him. And too many instances of seeing it have made me immune.
I drift off sometime before dawn, just when the sounds of the city are replaced by the first birds starting to chirp. It’s an uncomfortable, dreamless sleep, in which I’m not all the way there and still conscious of things. Terrance moving around. Terrance showering. Terrance dressing and zipping up his bag.
He’s standing by the window, dressed in a white shirt and jeans, when I roll over and open my eyes. I glance around the room and see all his things are gone.
“Hey,” I say sleepily.
He turns his head. Not his body, just his head. “Hey.” His voice is crisp, certain.
I’m not stupid. I know exactly what he’s certain of. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, stand, and self-consciously wobble for a second.
“Got your passport, doctor?”
“Doctor?”
“Andre Mason.”
A fake smile. “Yeah. I forgot.”
“Better not forget. Your cover legend, it’s important.…”
“I know, Gwen.”
I nod, bite my lips between my teeth. There’s a sob rolling up from my stomach, so I pinch my eyes shut and swallow it back down. “You’re not the only one,” I say.
“The only one what?”
“Who hates this,” I say. “You think I like it? Being this way?”
His shoulders sag. Not what he wanted to hear. “You’re doing—what you have to. I get that.”
“You’re in just as much danger as I am,” I say. “I’m sorry that you are. I’m sorry that it’s my fault. But, Terrance…”
“Not this way,” he says, his voice on the edge of anger. “If I go to jail, so be it. If I—get shot. I’m living my way. Mine. I’m not becoming—something I’m not.”
“Not becoming me,” I say, angry now, too. “What you mean to say is, you’re not becoming me.”
Terrance opens his mouth, about to protest. Then he closes it. “Like I told you, when you get to Zurich, look up Naz Sadik.”
I raise my hand to my eyes, look away. I swallow down the sob again. “Where will you go—no, better if you don’t tell me. I’ll e-mail you. The ParallaxMail account, okay?”
“Naz Sadik,” he repeats. “I’ll reach out. Tell her to expect you.”
My body sways back and forth, and I reach dow
n to find the bed, then sit. “Tell me—you feel this, Terrance,” I say. “Tell me it’s hard for you, too.”
In a second, he’s in front of me, hands on my cheeks, tilting my head up. He bends and kisses me with very soft lips and says that it is.
Part Two
LILA
Fifteen
In Valencia, spring rain and empty streets. It’s another month before the tourists come, and so it’s just locals here and visitors from other parts of Spain. My accent won’t be mistaken for native—too porteño, too South American, and none of that gorgeous sibilance that turns every s into a th. But I understand and am understood here, and have no trouble remaining invisible.
For two days, I play the visitor, renting a motor scooter and taking a room in a cheap hotel off the beach with a pool out front still empty for the off-season. I buy some cheap black ballet flats and a black cocktail dress of the kind of stretchy material you can shove in the bottom of a backpack and wash in the sink. I also buy a pair of small binoculars from a flea market that accompany me every day for my afternoons at the marina. There I while away the hours at an outdoor café, watching the yachts going in and out of the harbor.
A Gulf prince with a vast belly stands in a Speedo on the deck of an enormous yacht. He squinches his mouth beneath a ferret-sized mustache, surveying the Valencia shoreline like he’s thinking about buying it. On another yacht, some pink-skinned tycoon with wisps of snow-colored hair smokes a cigarette in a long holder as he strolls around the deck nude. His girlfriend in a gold bikini, age approximately my own, rises from a lounge chair and languidly fixes herself a cocktail.
This is voyeurism at its very best, so much more louche and interesting than the middle-class domestic vignettes I’d see from my apartment windows in Montevideo and New York and Moscow. But as interesting as the humans in my marina-zoo can be, it’s the names on the sides of the yachts that I check out first. They range from the curious—Anonym II, Meduse—to the stupid—NautiBoy, Sail-a-bration. But the one name I’m looking for, Erebus, pulls into the harbor right on schedule late in the afternoon of my second day.
It’s enormous, even by yacht standards, and only the masculinity of the Gulf prince remains unthreatened after its arrival. A crew of seven, all in white uniforms, scramble about on deck among elegant white curves and black-tinted windows. An impossibly complicated array of antennas and satellite dishes sprout from the top like a silly hat. Three figures, two dressed mainly in black, and one in a tan suit and open-collar white shirt, climb down a staircase from the ship’s stern to the pier. The figures in black are of the same species as Nikko Kucheto, short-clipped hair and bulky builds. The man in the tan suit, trim and handsome behind expensive-looking sunglasses, has a conversation with some official in a uniform who comes out to meet them. It’s concluded swiftly, and in a few minutes the three are headed to the street.
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