by Camilla Monk
I gazed at the picture again, trying to remember every detail. I wanted to keep it, but it was Jan’s, and with his wife gone, all he had left were Andrea and his albums. I hadn’t realized my hand still hovered above the plastic film. I snatched it back.
When he saw that, he removed the photograph from his album and placed it on my lap. “Keep it. I have better ones anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I have pics of your dad bathing an armadillo.”
My eyes went wide. “Seriously? But . . . how? Why?”
He let out a heavy sigh, as if recounting some grisly tale of war. “Bolino the armadillo . . . It’s a long story. He stole it from a circus when he met your mother. Gave it to a zoo afterward. They don’t make good pets, and that one was a complete asshole. Antisocial or something like that.”
Wait . . . Hadn’t Dries said something about it, back in Tokyo? About how he could never kill an armadillo? I blinked stupidly, picturing a younger Dries chasing an antisocial armadillo rolling away in a tight ball, and I wondered what sort of role my mother could have possibly played in this. “I’m sorry, but, again. Why?”
A grin pierced through Jan’s golden beard. “Well . . .”
Outside, a light rain had started to fall, rustling through the leaves, pattering against the windows. He paused. Andrea’s sudden bark alerted us to March and Dries’s return before the gate even had a chance to creak.
15
GTA
He laid her carefully on a bed of kale and daikon radish, and there, under the hot summer rain, he planted his secret seed in her.
—Calypso Cooter, Enslaved by The Billionaire Microgreens Farmer
“But why is he so sure that woman is suspicious?” I asked March, after he had given us a brief account of his and Dries’s meeting at Santa Lucia Station with the snitch named Jukebox: His mom had a cousin who knew a guy who worked at the reception of a seedy hotel located in the industrial area of Mestre, Venice’s continental half. He had welcomed a woman in her midthirties two days ago. She had the same long black hair as Sabina Falchi, didn’t carry any suitcase, looked completely haggard, and had remained locked inside her room since.
“The receptionist was worried because in the past forty-eight hours . . . she hasn’t received any clients.”
Dries nodded. “Confirmed by the owner of the sex shop next door.”
I cringed. “It’s that kind of hotel?”
“Primarily,” March admitted. “They’ve joined online booking websites to diversify their clientele, but with little result so far.”
Wow. That Jukebox guy really knew everything. Jan seemed unimpressed though. He shrugged. “Did Jukkie get you your stuff?”
“Yes,” March said. “He does offer very competitive prices. Speaking of which”—he fished for a black phone from his pocket and handed it to me—“you might need it.”
My heart swelled. A fake iPhone running on Android! I hugged him in front of a mildly disgusted Dries. “Thank you!”
“Island.”
I paused in my examination of this marvel of Chinese technology.
March seemed conflicted, his eyebrows drawn in a halfhearted scowl. “I trust you,” he eventually said.
“I understand.”
There was no need for more. Jan and Dries didn’t get it, of course, and they stared at our exchange as if he’d just asked for my hand in marriage: amusement on my left and barely contained irritation to my right.
Now that I potentially had access to my mailbox and Candy Crush account again, there was one last practicality nagging at me. “Jan, your guy . . . aren’t you worried that he’s going to sell his intel to other people?”
He looked almost offended. “He doesn’t talk to the cops.”
“And to, um, noncops?” I insisted.
Jan’s eyes narrowed. “You’re judging again.”
“He calls himself Jukebox.”
March exchanged a look with Dries. “It’s a possibility. But if that guest is Falchi, it’s worth a try.”
“So when do we leave?” I asked.
I expected I’d have to fight to come with them, but there was no patronizing retort nor any attempt to outmacho me this time. “Now,” Dries replied. “We’ve already imposed for too long.”
More like: I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long, but it made sense anyway. I felt my back pocket to make sure Jan’s Polaroid was safely tucked in there, slipped the phone in my front pocket, and I was good to go. Because I was learning to live with nothing but my life and my dreams!
Dries exchanged a bro hug with Jan. March bade him a polite good-bye, all the while trying to escape Andrea, who wanted to lick his hand—he made it clear that it would not happen. When it was my turn, I wasn’t sure what to say, because I owed this near-stranger so much, and yet I didn’t even know his last name, or if we’d ever see each other again. I gave him an awkward bro hug too, which he returned loosely, as if he feared he’d break me to pieces.
I took one last look at the garden under the rain and smiled at him. “Jan. Are you on Facebook?”
After a short and thankfully safe walk through the backstreets of Santa Croce, we reached Piazzale Roma, a large square serving to park the countless cars and buses that were banned in the historical center. A few concrete buildings announced the return to the twenty-first century and the last stop before leaving the lagoon. Whether he could be trusted or not, Jukebox had delivered so far—true to his word, he had arranged for one of his uncle’s friends to wait for us with a black Audi. Our new vehicle came complete with free German road maps, Fruitella candy in the glove compartment—or the cubbyhole, as Dries said when he took one—brand-new plates, and even a booster seat! Ready to be wrecked, I thought with a touch of fatalism. Before he took the wheel, March gave back the booster seat with a passing comment that the car was “perhaps a little too fresh.” I shushed my conscience, because it was this or walking all the way to Mestre.
By the time we reached the Ponte della Libertà, a long bridge linking Venice to the continent, the windshield wipers battled against a downpour. The horizon had been swallowed by dark clouds, leaving nothing but grayish paint daubs that were supposed to be cruise ships.
In the passenger seat, Dries had intended to light up a cigarillo and chill, but March gave him the pigeon eye, the one where he peers at people sideways like they just committed a mortal sin: intense, judgmental, inescapable. So Dries closed his silvery cigarette case and focused on harassing me instead. “Do you ever stop playing with your phone? If you don’t stop, I’m throwing you out of this car.”
“Empty threats,” I quipped from the back seat, without raising my eyes from the screen.
“What are you doing anyway?”
“I was liking that Roomba cat video a friend posted on Facebook.”
“Roomba what?”
“Look.” I gave him the phone. “He has several cats, and also a Roomba. So he films them riding the Roomba.”
Dries watched the orange tabby amble around Stiles’s living room, sitting regally on the little vacuum-cleaning robot. In the background, he could be heard taking pics and encouraging Ron—that was the cat’s name. “Yes! Give me that look! Blue steel!”
“Why in the world is that animal wearing a frog hat?” Dries asked, pausing the video.
“Because it’s funnier this way.”
He handed me back my phone with an air of consternation. As he did so, I noticed a new notification under the video: DKK & Andrea likes this. I squirmed in the back seat, performing a little victory dance.
“Dries,” March said, turning right past a gas station and a few residence buildings.
We were almost there, driving on an avenue no doubt lined with trees to conceal the many plants and tagged warehouses surrounding us. To our right stood the sex shop Dries had mentioned earlier, a sad, neutral showcase promising personal booths—thank God!—but none of the moist heat of Enslaved by the Billionaire Microgreens Farmer.
&nb
sp; The hotel stood a little farther down the road. It was one of those austere three-story cubes from the sixties, made even gloomier by the pouring weather. An empty bar occupied the first floor, its windows covered with flashy ads for the latest scratch games.
One thing didn’t belong in this decor though: a red Alfa Romeo roadster. Not much to do with the dad cars and light trucks lining the parking lot.
“Someone won the lottery.” Dries chuckled, but he didn’t look particularly happy.
“Island, I’d prefer you stay in the car,” March said.
Dries turned in his seat to scrutinize me. “Can she be the driver?”
“No.”
I resented March’s answer. I wasn’t that bad with a wheel!
“Then she’s coming with us,” Dries decided, to March’s apparent irritation.
In the lobby, the yellow-painted walls and airport seats offered little for potential tourists to dream of. A few posters of Venice had been hung on the wall, but otherwise the place looked like a DMV office, down to the gray linoleum my hair was dripping onto. March and Dries walked to the desk, where a single employee snoozed behind an artificial orchid.
The receptionist, a young guy with prematurely thinning hair he combed forward like Donald Trump, never got up from his office chair, choosing instead to wheel himself to the other end of the desk. “Buona sera, signora e signori. Per un’ora or per la notte?” Good afternoon, lady and gentlemen. For an hour or for the night?
I fought an eye roll. He wasn’t even trying.
March leaned on the counter with his most charming smile. I’d have run if I were that guy. He showed him a picture of Sabina Falchi on his phone. “Numero di stanza?” Room number?
The receptionist gave him shifty eyes and answered in English, with a thick accent, “I don’t know if she’s in her room, sir.”
March’s smile was softer than ever as he opened his jacket, just a fraction, to let him see the gun inside. “Please, can I have her room number?”
Behind him, Dries crossed his arms and watched, manifestly pleased by this turn of events.
The young man staggered back and rummaged through a set of drawers behind the desk. He retrieved a key to room number 205, which he gave to March. “No trouble in the hotel?” he asked, his voice a barely audible squeak.
March wouldn’t lie, so he remained silent, while Dries strolled toward a narrow staircase leading to the first floor. “Never any trouble,” he said, almost to himself.
I was ready to follow, but March’s eyes darted to the plastic seats against the wall. He fished in his pocket for the car keys. “We’ll be back shortly; can you wait for us, please?” I was about to protest when he lowered his voice and dropped the keys in my hand. “If anything happens, don’t wait for us. Leave.”
How I wanted to go up there and question our mysterious witness while smoking a pipe. But he had a point: if a questionable surprise awaited them, I wouldn’t help much in a gunfight. I went to sit with a dejected sigh.
That Italian Donald Trump made a quick phone call, and once he was done, he wouldn’t stop looking at me, as if my face could tell him what March and Dries were doing up there. He wasn’t the only one interested: some grandpa who wore a leather jacket and too much cologne strolled past me with a girl about my age clinging to his arm. Her dress should have been short enough to warrant his undivided attention, but he leered at me anyway and stopped to whisper something in the receptionist’s ear.
The young guy shook his head. Unconvinced, the grandpa sent another scorching look my way and, to my and the receptionist’s horror, made a come-hither gesture. The move angered his escort, who expressed strong disapproval, emphasized with a firm statement that she was not interested in any form of bunga bunga.
I shrank in my seat. I wasn’t interested in a mini-orgy either, but that creepy old fart was already walking toward me, unfettered by the receptionist’s weak protests. The girl warned she’d leave without him, which would make me the only target left. I got up from my seat warily, and I glanced at the outline of the black Audi on the parking lot, blurred by the raindrops pit-patting against the lobby’s windows. Waiting in the car didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.
When the old guy was close enough for me to count the leather fringes dangling from the sleeves of his jacket, I shook my head vigorously and hurried past his slew of amused protests. The moment I stepped outside, something red flashed in my field of vision. The red Alfa was leaving. I wiped the raindrops clinging to my eyelashes and checked the driver through the windshield, almost mechanically. Woman, pretty. Black hair.
Like . . . Sabina Falchi?
I caught sight of Donaldo Trumpo through the window. Our eyes met. His face fell like melted mozzarella, and it was all the confirmation I needed. Forgetting about the hours, days, weeks of purgatory potentially awaiting me for breaking March’s rules again, I raced to the Audi and jumped in the driver’s seat. A flicker of guilt, and no doubt puppy love, had me put my seat belt on . . . before I started in fifth gear.
I bulleted out of the parking lot, scraping a couple of bumpers in the process. Hand on the brake, I spun the wheel like Bo Duke in his General Lee to take a turn on the road we had arrived on. Once I was more or less in the lines, driving fast through the industrial area, a red smudge appeared in the distance. I followed the Alfa as it took a left on a road lined with stacks of containers, the wipers flapping back and forth madly to fight that never-ending rain. A flash of lightning tearing ashen clouds warned me that the weather wouldn’t get any better soon. We were leaving Mestre, and that’s when she noticed me, presumably because I kept swerving and passing cars to catch up to her.
Surf formed under the Alfa’s tires as it sped up. I imitated her, choosing to ignore the three-digit number on my speed counter. In the same instant, the Chinese iPhone vibrated in my pants pocket. Picking up at 110 kph would certainly be against road rules, but March was probably mad, worried sick, and I needed to tell him I was tailing Sabina Falchi. My left hand never leaving the wheel, I pulled the phone out of my pocket, dropped it in the cup holder, and quickly tapped twice to both accept the call and activate the speakerphone.
I shouldn’t have done that.
March’s roar exploded through the speaker. “Island!”
I gripped the wheel with a grimace. “I’m so, so sorry, but I can’t talk right now, I’m right behind her. The Alfa Romeo, it was hers! I think the receptionist warned her you were coming.”
I could practically hear his teeth grinding together as he digested the news. “Where are you?”
“Um . . . I think I’m on Via dell’Elettronica, in the industrial area.”
Dries’s voice took over. “I will strangle you for this, but for now, check under the seat—he always keeps a spare gun there. And get me that woman.”
“Don’t listen to him! Keep following her at a distance and for the love of God, wait for us!” March insisted.
“Yeah, I’ll do that. I’m not shooting anyone.”
“And don’t hang up. I want you to tell me exactly where you’re going.”
I picked up background noise—the revving of an engine: they were driving too. Someone would be pissed when searching the parking lot for their car. Shaking the thought away, I focused on Sabina Falchi’s car ahead of me. The road was getting smaller; we were out of the industrial area, racing fast along a river. I glanced at the GPS and yelled in the speaker.
“We’re on via Moranzani. She’s headed to the seafront. I think we got her; she’s minutes away from a dead end!”
March’s voice answered me, now back to a cooler, professional tone. “Good. Don’t try anything; just park sideways to block her exit if you can.”
I squinted at the road ahead, which had turned into a grayish mist by the heavy rain. It split into two smaller alleys. One led straight to the sea and was the dead end I could see on the GPS’s screen. The other . . . didn’t really exist. It was just a path winding through a grove, wh
ich had been barred by a row of garbage bins belonging to a nearby camping. There was therefore no valid reason to take it, and, Jesus . . . was she seriously going to?
The contents of a green bin went flying my way as the Alfa Romeo rammed into it and forced its way onto the trail beyond. Soda cans clanked against the windshield; through the speaker, March asked what was going on, and Dries whether I was dead yet. I ignored them and crushed the gas pedal, not even caring that a close brush with a glass bin had probably ruined the Audi’s right door.
“I’m still after her!” I gasped when the car started to shake on a gravelly path, and the sea came into view. “She went off the road!”
“And you?” March asked, nearly shouting that last word.
“Oh, I followed her. But it’s okay!” It wasn’t, I realized, as both our cars burst out of the grove and onto a walkway stretching along the raging sea. Now was the time to pull on the brake hard or end up in the lagoon with Sabina Falchi. I didn’t think she’d be the first to give up, but she did. The Alfa drifted to a stop sideways and hit the iron railing lining the walkway.
I could see her through the window, trapped, blinking at me madly through the droplets snaking down her car’s windows. Black tresses fell on her shoulders, curtaining part of her face. One of her hands still gripped the wheel, and she too held her phone in the other. Sensing victory at hand’s reach, I stopped the Audi inches away from her car and blindly searched for the gun Dries had mentioned. I felt the cool metal of a barrel. Once I had a firm grip on the semiautomatic, my first impulse was to jump out and proceed to a citizen’s arrest—regardless of the fact that the safety was still on.
I’m glad I didn’t do that. Because I had been so busy mentally rehearsing a badass line, I didn’t see the gray SUV coming from my right until it was too late, and I could do nothing but watch in slow motion as it crashed into the Audi’s passenger side.
The next couple of seconds were the very definition of a moment suspended in time. A bad moment, where my heart stopped, and everything felt slow and unreal. The airbags bursting all around me muted the moan of metal being crushed and glass shattering. Pain erupted like fireworks in my chest and limbs as my body slammed against the door. Around me, the seafront became a blur as the Audi went spinning out of the way. It veered as if it’d topple over. I braced myself. Nothing came, and the car eventually stopped moving.