Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  She replaced the receiver and squeezed Kurt’s knee. “Come,” she said. “We must not forget we have business to take care of.”

  “Funny,” he said, “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  She latched the jewel box and returned it to the hiding place under the hearthstone. They walked out through the arcade past a still swimming pool whose eerie, aqueous light cast phosphorescent reflections against the columns. At the end of the long archway there was a stairwell winding down to a dim basement. Cecilia unlocked a door at the bottom of the stairs and led him inside an unfinished room with a single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, its meager light suffusing the place in a ghostly gray pallor.

  “The first thing I shall do,” she said, “is install professional lighting.” She pointed. “Track lights, don’t you think?”

  She began to question Kurt about Cybex machines and free weights and bicycles and treadmills and whirlpool baths. Pacing the empty floor space in a jerky, erratic ramble, she suggested where each piece of equipment might be located.

  “Well,” he said, trying again to focus, “you know what you want, after all. You don’t really need me, then, do you?”

  Cecilia wandered into an unlit corner and sat down on a weight bench, the only object in the room. “Come,” she said, patting the leather. A barbell was set in the rack, forty pounds, enough for a routine workout.

  “I can tell you are a man of considerable experience,” she said. “I’m sure you can teach me many things. I am always eager to improve.”

  He stood before her, looking down at the barbell, at her darkened face. She rose and began to unbutton his shirt. “So let us begin the lesson,” she said.

  She pulled apart the shirt, baring his chest, and ran her fingers through the thick brown hair. Her nails welted his skin. She leaned forward and opened her warm mouth over an erect nipple, circling it with her tongue.

  Interrogation gets a whole lot easier, Kurt thought, when you’re not a cop.

  They kissed hard, clacking teeth, a hot edgy cocaine kiss, dry and furious. Their embrace had a grudging anger about it, yet he was aroused, his skin damp and tingling.

  “Let me watch you,” she said, pinching his nipple. She gave him a push and he tripped backward, sitting hard on the bench. “I want to feel your muscles working.”

  Go with this, he thought. But remember why you’re here.

  “Lift,” she said, her hands on his shoulders, forcing him to lie back on the bench. “Show me what you can do.”

  He scooted into position to grip the barbell and lifted it off the rack. He began to bench-press the forty pounds, taking his time, sweat dripping down his arms, his ribs.

  Cecilia hiked up her dress and straddled his thighs, sliding her hands through the wet hair on his chest, massaging his pecs. She caressed his face, her nails nicking the stitches above his eye. “What happened here?” she whispered. “Did one of your women hurt you?”

  Kurt remembered that final moment in the Grottos with Graciela, someone standing over them. The blinding light. He extended his arms and set the barbell in the rack, then lay back, exhausted from the workout and the coke and the entire wasted evening.

  “Do you like it when your women hurt you?”

  She took his wrists and forced his weakened forearms underneath the bench. Something attached to the bottom of the board made a loose rattling noise as her hands fumbled about beneath them. He had no idea what she was doing until the rattling thing clamped tightly around one wrist, then the other. Instantly he recognized the snap of cold stainless steel. He’d handcuffed a few miserable bastards in his day.

  “Tell me about them,” she said, raising herself upright, her hands braced on his sweating chest. “I want to know all about your women.”

  Kurt wriggled his wrists, testing the cuffs. They were the real thing. She sat on his belly, rubbing herself against him in a slow circular motion, her coarse hair bristling his bare skin. He rocked his shoulders, testing the bounds of mobility, but found himself trapped beneath her.

  “That girl upstairs. The little blonde whore who brings the drinks,” she said. “Is she one of them?”

  Kurt felt like a complete fool. He couldn’t believe he’d let her handcuff him to a fucking weight bench.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said, flicking a long nail across one of the wiry stitches in his forehead. It was not a pleasant sensation. “I want to know who they are, these precious whores of yours.”

  This is your moment, he thought. Your only chance now.

  “I meet them at the Meadow,” he said.

  “The ones you massage?” she asked. “They put themselves at your mercy?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And then you fuck them in the ass.” She took hold of a stitch between her nails, like a nurse with a tweezer, and gave it a quick little tug. A sharp white flash of pain hit him behind the eyes. He struggled against the cuffs.

  “Tell me about them,” she said. “These foolish women who come to your mountain meadow to save the world. Do you fuck them all?”

  “Only the Latin ones,” he said.

  She tugged at another stitch and he winced. “Tell me,” she said, grinding her teeth, her face flushed and wet.

  “There is a new one from Argentina,” he said. “Her name is Graciela. I take her to the Grottos at night and we fuck in the rocks.”

  He didn’t know what to expect now, only that he needed to lead her further, to reel out more line until something struck.

  “I was with her at Andre’s,” he said, “when I saw you there with Jake Pfeil. She told me she knew you. Do you remember her? A beautiful woman from Argentina.”

  The muted light veiled the confusion in her damp face but he could feel the sudden terror toiling and turning behind those dark eyes, working its way out, moving from uncertainty and doubt into a small safe discovery. She didn’t like what she was hearing.

  “You’re a bad boy,” she said in a soft voice. “A very bad boy. You have lied to me.”

  She kissed his forehead gently, his eyelashes. Long black hair fell from her shoulders, concealing everything but those piercing eyes. “You told me you were alone, my friend. Instead you were there with your fat whore from Argentina. I am unhappy when I am lied to. It makes me very angry.”

  She kissed his cheeks, soft nibbling kisses. He couldn’t move. Her strong legs were locked against his ribs.

  “And now you want to fuck me,” she said, “like you fuck all the others. You pick me up at the club and tell me lies and want me to be your whore.”

  Her fingertips delicately touched his stitches, as though counting each one. “You’re a very bad boy,” she said. “And bad boys must take their punishment.”

  There was a quick blinding prick of pain, like a hot needle inserted into his eye. He cried out, hurt, his stomach churning sudden nausea. She’d yanked loose one of the stitches. Blood was trickling down his face.

  “You fucking crazy bitch!” he gasped, rocking from side to side.

  “Now we’ll find out,” she said, “who is the whore.”

  She lifted the skirt of her dress and slid herself onto his face, dropping the folds like a hood over his head. Darkness enveloped him and he struggled to breathe, his nostrils stuffed with musky hair. Her athletic thighs managed him, directed his resisting mouth. Just when he thought she might suffocate him, break his windpipe, she released a long shuddering moan and went slack, resting her full weight on his face. He began to gag. Blood from the torn stitch was dripping into his ear.

  She finally raised her dress and crawled off of him. “Gusano!” she said, rubbing at a small bloodstain on the skirt. “Look what you’ve done. Now I must go upstairs and change.”

  The room’s basement air was a cool relief to his lungs. He felt like a prisoner given a momentary reprieve from the guards.

  “You revolt me,” Cecilia said bitterly. “I ought to have you beaten for this.”

  Kurt wriggled his arms, his sh
ackled wrists. He tried to blink away the blood in his eye.

  “Here,” she said, tossing a key that bounced off his chest onto the concrete floor. “Let yourself out through the servants’ area. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  When she reached the door Kurt shouted her name. “Why did Graciela think she knew you?” he asked in a hoarse voice. “And Quiroga?”

  Cecilia hesitated, then turned to peer at him through the dusky light. She seemed to understand now that she had been set up. Anger coiled around her like heat from an exposed wire. “I don’t know who you are or what you want,” she said, “but I intend to find out.” She slammed the door behind her.

  Kurt felt drained, humiliated, in pain. He lay there for some time, trying to shape his scattered thoughts. The cocaine was wearing off and he felt hot and shaky and inexplicably annoyed with his entire life. He realized he was chewing his lip. He couldn’t believe he’d let some little bitch handcuff him half naked to a weight bench.

  Jerking wildly at the cuffs, Kurt finally managed to pull loose the lynch screw. He squirmed to the bottom end of the bench and slid his butt off onto the cold concrete, then rocked the legs until the bench turned over. The barbell crashed to the floor with a loud rattling clang and rolled away. It took considerable effort to maneuver his cuffed wrists under his feet and around in front of him, and he grunted and strained and cursed the girl for doing this to him. Finally he crawled over to the key and unlocked the cuffs. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants and applied it quickly to the bleeding stitch. His face and hair were wet with blood.

  Groping his way through the dark basement, he found the stairs. At the swimming pool he knelt down to soak the handkerchief, leaving a red bloom in the motionless water.

  “Perdóneme, señor,” a voice said above him. “Mr. Rostagno would like to see you in his study.”

  Kurt looked up to find a short, barrel-chested Hispanic man in a pressed white guayabera shirt gazing down at him. Kurt had seen this man somewhere before, but with the pain in his head, the ripped stitch and gnawing cocaine crash, he couldn’t remember where.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Mr. Rostagno wants me to play happy-hour piano.”

  The man was trying to place Kurt as well. He cocked his large head, studying him. Ancient acne scars pitted his face.

  “If you please,” he said, motioning toward the arcade with an open hand. “It would be better if we go quietly.”

  Claudio Rostagno was waiting for them in his study. Distracted, grim, he paced the soft carpet in what Kurt recognized as familiar court behavior, a tennis pro angry with himself, going deep inside to deliver the next serve. Kurt’s arrival brought him around.

  “I want to look in your face,” he said, setting his drink on the large rosewood desk. He was close enough to breathe expensive Scotch on Kurt, his arms locked behind his back like an officer examining a troop. “I want to see what kind of man would come into my home uninvited and insult my daughter.”

  Behind the thick black frames of his horn-rim glasses were the eyes of authority, the cold, confident eyes of someone who was used to being obeyed. There was a dark ferocity that suggested guile and perhaps other, more chilling qualities.

  “I’m going to have you arrested,” he said. “Rafael, please call Starwood security.”

  Kurt grinned weakly at the barrel-chested man standing near the double doors. “Go ahead, Rafael,” he said. “I’ll be happy to show them where Cecilia keeps her stash of coke.”

  Rostagno exhaled a long breath, his shoulders slumping, his chest caving slightly. Clearly he had heard this sort of thing before.

  “I don’t even know your name,” Rostagno said. “What do you want from us?”

  Kurt looked around the room. It was not unlike his father’s study, Old World and male and sealed off with a timeless antique air that hinted of stale tobacco and aging brandy. There were shelves of hefty volumes and overstuffed reading chairs and a large leathery globe of the kind no one had manufactured in thirty years. But something about this place struck Kurt as odd. For a man who had rendered decades of political service to his country, there were no plaques of recognition, no framed certificates of honor and achievement, no flags or engraved cigarette lighters, not the usual wall of photographs of the ambassador with other distinguished men of international repute. It took Kurt a moment to understand what was bothering him. The study appeared curiously false.

  “I’ve lost a friend,” Kurt said finally. “I came here tonight because I thought your daughter could help me find her.”

  Rostagno placed a hand in one pocket of his blazer, a dapper gesture, and went to his desk to retrieve the drink. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. His bearing was rigidly perpendicular, his shoulders thrown back. “Rafael, would you please see to it that this man is escorted off the premises. He seems to be another one of my daughter’s disgusting distractions. I don’t want him mingling with the guests.”

  Rafael left his post by the doors and came forward. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Kurt recalled now where he’d first seen Rafael. The powdered pool cue, the Más Mota T-shirt.

  “Somebody thought he knew your daughter and he ended up floating in the river,” Kurt said to Rostagno. “A woman I admire very much thought she knew her too. Now she’s missing and my guess is she’ll turn up dead. Maybe it’s just a coincidence about your daughter. Maybe one and one don’t really add up to two murders. You better hope so, Mr. Rostagno.”

  “Rafael.” Rostagno nodded angrily at Kurt.

  The barrel-chested man reached out and took Kurt’s arm, but Kurt jerked away. “I can find my own way out,” he said.

  At the door Kurt turned to regard the Italian diplomat. “I have a feeling this isn’t the last time we’ll see each other.”

  Rostagno stared at him with a cold hatred, with a feudal sense of insult, of family honor violated. In his darkest moments Kurt’s father had been capable of this same outrage.

  “You have made a grave mistake coming here tonight, my friend,” Rostagno said. “For your sake you had better hope our paths never cross again.”

  Kurt leaned against the railing of the footbridge and stared down into the moonlit stream. Arriving guests passed behind him, and someone was complaining about the food at a ritzy restaurant in town. “Too much cilantro,” she kept repeating. “Too much cilantro, don’t you agree?” Although the stitch had stopped bleeding he was still crashing from the cocaine, in a foul mood, unsure what to do next. Maybe he should talk to Muffin, but he couldn’t face her reaction to how stupid he’d been. Always letting the little head do the thinking.

  Suddenly there were loud, angry voices in the private drive. He turned to see Cecilia storming down the gravel pathway, crying, shouting at the man following after her, arguing in a language Kurt didn’t understand. She slammed the door of a sports car and cranked the engine. Her father stood over her, fuming, his hands clamped down on the window frame as if he could restrain the sleek little automobile by force. But the tires screeched rubber, knocking him backward, and the car weaved out of the driveway and into the night.

  Kurt raced for his Jeep and followed her taillights down the deep, vine-choked lanes of Starwood. She might have lost him had she not slowed for the guard station, where Harley Ferris came out to watch her creep by, a hand on his hip, grinning from ear to ear.

  Kurt kept pace more by sound than sight. He could hear the Miata squealing around the hairpin curves of the gorge below and knew she was not yet out of reach. Harley had said that someday she was going to kill someone in that car, and Kurt thought it might be tonight. He pushed his old Willys for all it was worth, but the Jeep was no match for her. He felt like a crude amateur telescope searching for the quick flash of a meteorite in the vast nighttime sky.

  Swerving down from McLain Flats he saw sparks shower the darkness near the Rio Grande trailhead and figured that she’d bucked onto the narrow river-bridge, her tailpipe scraping hard aga
inst the concrete bed. He floorboarded the Jeep past the old cemetery where his father was buried and finally caught a glimpse of the sports car when it ripped through the red light at Highway 82.

  The sight of town itself seemed to sober her driving and she slowed past the quiet West End neighborhood, the dark empty park, the red brick buildings still glittering in June with ridiculous white twinkle lights. He was able to catch up near Carl’s Pharmacy and follow her sharp, last-second turns through the small busy streets near the pedestrian mall. It did not surprise him when she skidded to a stop in front of the Blake Building.

  He parked across the street and watched her walk hastily to the intercom at the building’s glass entrance. She jabbed a suite button several times and ran an impatient hand through her windblown hair.

  “I need to see you!” she said to the intercom, her shrill words audible to Kurt across the street. “Are you alone?”

  There was a long silence and then a buzzer sounded, permitting her into the building.

  Kurt didn’t have to read the nameplate to know who Cecilia had come to visit. He looked up at the windows of Jake Pfeil’s corner suite. Light seeped softly through the drawn curtains. The old quarterback was at home.

  He sat motionless in his Jeep for some time, feeling wasted, muddleheaded. He was coming down hard from the coke and the hot surliness had now given way to an eye-burning exhaustion. He could smell his own body odor, a sour funk that stained his shirt. He rubbed his salty face, the tiny bristles of a fresh shave like steel wool irritating his skin. He needed a drink to dull the blade inside him that made little slices at his patience. He needed to talk to somebody who could tell him something useful.

  On the corner there was a bar in an old bank building from the mining era, its entrance the original iron vault door imprinted UTE CITY BANK AND TRUST, 1885. Kurt ordered a shot of tequila and a beer and took them to a pay phone in the rear, near a barred teller window where a pretty girl checked coats.