by Nevada Barr
The blood drained from her face so quickly she swayed and might have fallen had Anna not steadied her. “He smells the girls,” Clare gasped. “I know it. He knows they’re here.” Yanking free of Anna’s fingers, she started for the door. Anna wrapped her arms around the other woman’s chest and arms.
Clare fought back, trying to kick Anna’s legs or force her arms from around her. Lack of food and care had made her so weak that Anna found it no harder than holding a small child. “Stop it,” Anna growled.
Clare landed a heel on Anna’s instep, and Anna bit off a shriek, then sank her teeth into the other woman’s shoulder. The pain got Clare’s attention.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” Anna said insistently into the ear that was closest. “We don’t know what the dog smells. We’ll do it, but let’s do it right.”
Since they’d gotten off on the wrong high-heel-shod foot, there really was no right way, but there had to be something righter than charging headlong through doors that could open onto any damn thing.
“If this is the fancy house—”
“It is!” snapped Clare, but she didn’t start struggling again.
“Then it’s going to have security. Men with guns. Bouncers, thugs. If the chief of police is involved, you can bet there’s a few off-duty cops doing his dirty work for a cut of the money.” Clare felt a bit more compliant, so Anna let her loose.
Clare didn’t turn around. In a voice as flat and heavy as a manhole cover she said, “Go if you want. I’m not leaving.” There was no doubt in Anna’s mind what she meant. Clare would find her children or she would die, and it would be done tonight. Through the door they faced was the proverbial lady or the tiger, and it didn’t sound as if Clare even knew anymore which she preferred.
“The door locked behind us, so it looks like I’m staying,” Anna said. “I’d rather like to survive this next bit, so can we do it my way? Slow, careful, with great stealth and cunning? Ready to run away should the situation call for it?”
Clare, evidently beyond speech, managed to nod her head, once up, once down, like a poorly lubricated robot.
Leaving the detested high heels on the floor of the dressing room, Anna slipped around Clare and the dog, turned this second knob silently, opened the door a crack, and looked out into an unpeopled hallway, dimly lit with wall sconces reminiscent of those in the Chance, with doors opening to either side. The walls were papered in flocked maroon on red, classic-cartoon whorehouse. Given that cartoons had to be derived from something, perhaps it was authentic to the Victorian era.
Anna stepped through. Mackie started to dart ahead of her, and she stepped on the end of the belt-leash, jerking him to a halt. “Maybe we should leave the little guy here, in the dressing room,” she suggested.
Clare took the makeshift leash from her fingers. “No. He smells his girls.”
Anna let it go. In operations as ill begotten as this, having a fluffy little dog in the mix probably wouldn’t alter the outcome.
Moving quickly, knowing Clare couldn’t bear any undue delay, Anna padded quietly to the first door, listened, opened a crack, and then looked inside. Clare did the same on the opposite side of the hall, only with less stealth. Fortunately the floor they were on was apparently deserted.
The first two rooms were dormitories, with small wooden bunk beds, eight to one room and six to the other. Each bed was neatly made. The bedspreads were all the same, but on the bunks were the things children loved: stuffed animals and dolls. A couple had picture books.
“Boys’ dorm on the other side,” said Clare. Clearly, little boys were of no interest to her at this juncture.
“Girls’ here, I think,” Anna said as she stepped into the room. The charm of the scatter of childhood paraphernalia lulled her. For a moment she dared hope there’d been a mix-up and the children Daoud Suliman transported illegally into the country were being adopted into good homes by a caring institution. Then she caught sight of one of the “children’s” books on the nearest bed. It was hardcore child pornography.
A gift from an admirer.
A short, sharp intake of breath brought Anna’s attention back to Clare. The woman’s face was screwed up as if she might cry, but her mouth was held in a hard oval, lips pulled back freakishly from the teeth. It put Anna in mind of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. It wasn’t the crude picture that had undone her—Anna had seen photos as horrific on the walls of Clare’s apartment—but that Clare now saw her daughters in the pose, in the beds, on the laps of the men who put on anachronistic suits for an age-old perversion.
Mack pulled loose from his mistress’s nerveless fingers and trotted from bed to bed, finally stopping at one, reaching up the short ladder to the top bunk, and whining.
The Munch scream looked about to become audible.
Anna laid a hand on Clare’s arm. “Let’s go. The bunk is empty. It doesn’t matter whether Mackie smells Dana or Vee or a Hostess Twinkie.” Anna pulled Clare out of the dorm room, leaving Mack to come or not as his black button nose told him to. After another whine, he followed.
The next room looked to be the governess’s quarters. There was a queen-sized bed, a television, an armoire, a full bath, and a walk-in closet. A pair of jeans, two tops, and a handful of scarves were scattered across the bed, shoes littered the floor, and the closet door stood open. Inside were the clothes one would expect to find in a thirty-something’s closet and two pegs with the dreary ankle-length gray gowns of the stereotypical nineteenth-century governess.
“Watch the door,” Anna said and whipped the gossamer confection Star had kindly lent her over her head. The governess’s dress fit well enough; the skirt was a bit long, but it would serve to hide Anna’s bare feet. In the bathroom, she found the hairpins she knew would have to be there, given the no-nonsense bun the woman had worn. In less than a minute, she’d coiled her hair tight at the nape of her neck and secured it there.
Stepping out of the bathroom, she said, “I can’t say that I feel less obvious, but I probably am. Go back and put on a costume jacket,” she ordered Clare. “Maybe we’ll get out of this in one piece after all.” She said it to try to make the white around Clare’s pupils shrink, to calm her enough that she wouldn’t get them caught or killed. What she believed was that the protective coloration would probably only serve to get them deeper into the hornets’ nest before they were found out.
Clare jogged back to the men’s dressing room. Anna opened the next door. A large-bellied man, wearing vest, shirt, and cravat, a half-smoked cigar in his sausage-like fingers, was reclining on a fainting couch upholstered in green velvet. The walls picked up the green of the fabric and chased it through with turquoise and gold that complemented an ornate mirror above a cold fireplace and heavy drapes pulled over what Anna suspected was a blank wall.
The man wore no pants. A small African American boy, dressed in loincloth and turban, complete with jewel and feather at the brow, knelt between the barrel-sized thighs. Both looked up, startled, when Anna opened the door. The man blinked with slight annoyance. The child kowtowed, forehead to floor, rump in the air, as he had no doubt been taught to do when he was made a slave. The half-naked man put his foot to the boy’s rump and pushed hard enough to knock him over. “Mind your master, boy,” he said and winked at Anna as if she were in on the joke.
“Pardon me,” Anna managed and closed the door with difficulty. The hinges were oiled to the gliding point of silence, and the door moved easily. The difficulty was in turning her back on a child being abused when every instinct demanded she rush in swinging. If she and Clare were to find Clare’s daughters, now was not the time to start the war.
“Fuck it,” she said and jerked the door open again.
“What the hell?” the fat man growled, not amused to be caught with his pants down a second time.
“No smoking,” Anna said. “Fire codes.” She marched purposefully across the room and picked up the heavy glass ashtray he’d been using. Before he had time to think
, she brought it down on his skull hard enough to kill him.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Clare could not control her brain as her body went through the familiar motions of donning yet another character. Disassociation, she thought as she watched her hands sort rapidly through the clothing racks, pull out jacket, shirt, and trousers, and then, like creatures from a horror movie, strip her of her garments and put on the others.
Not only did she feel her hands were alien, but she no longer inhabited her body. It was as if she watched it being dressed from a corner near the ceiling. Jordan had gone, and she stared down on Clare Sullivan, poor broken, hopeless, useless Clare. The bunks where Mackie thought Dana or Vee or Aisha might have slept should have given her strength, but they had destroyed the last of it. Her children had been tortured; that thought burned through mind and body in an acid tide. It was all she could do to focus on the body following the pigeon ranger’s orders.
As she watched, Jordan’s rich pervert was converted to an Edwardian dandy, the illusion completed with the speed of someone used to quick changes in the dark backstage. The dandy moved through the door of the dressing room, and Clare followed, floating, ghostly, as the body that had once housed both her and Jordan walked quickly down the hall. The clothes had changed the stance, and the Edwardian gentleman moved with grace, spine straight, shoulders back, a slight swing as if he were accustomed to carrying a walking stick or umbrella.
He stopped before an open door and looked in. With nauseating familiarity Clare felt herself slamming back into her corporeal form at the sight of a little boy, forehead to floor, hands outstretched before him, in front of a half-naked man murdered on the sofa.
“Up you come,” Ranger Pigeon said not unkindly and lifted the boy by the arm. “What’s your name?” she asked.
Clare’s mind scrabbled over mountains of emotion in search of coherent thought. Part of her wanted to gather up this child, protect him against all evil, hold him and love him and, in him, all children. An equal part was thinking coldly, Not Dana, not Vee; dump the little bastard and get a move on.
“Simba, milady,” the boy told Anna Pigeon, not daring to raise his eyes from where they were fixed on the carpet two inches from his toes.
“No. Your real name,” Anna said. “Your before-here name.”
“We’re wasting time,” somebody said, and Clare realized the words had come from her mouth. Anna shot her a look that should have shamed her, but she was beyond such paltry agonies.
For a moment the child looked dazed; then he said tentatively, “Tyrone?”
“You’re working for me now, Tyrone,” Anna said briskly. “Ten dollars an hour. Slavery is illegal in America.”
“Yes, milady.”
Clare knew the ranger liked to think the kid understood the dignity she afforded, but, more likely, he was accustomed to doing whatever any adult told him to, regardless of how perverse or painful.
Tyrone was so small Clare felt a distant ache from wherever her heart had gone. She looked away from him to the man on the fainting couch. A thin trickle of blood at the hairline above his right eye was the only sign of life in his ashen face.
“Did you kill him?” she heard her voice ask, not caring one way or another.
“We can always hope,” Anna replied and, leading Tyrone by the hand, stepped into the hallway beside Clare, then closed the door on the unconscious pedophile.
The little boy began to look frightened, to realize this was not business as usual. Like the children wallpapering Clare’s apartment, Tyrone was sufficiently well versed in the seamier side of life to be constantly looking for which way to jump to survive another day or two.
Clare turned and walked down the hall with the outward confidence of a man of means, at home in his own club. At least her body did. She had again vacated the premises and floated near the ceiling watching herself, the ranger, and the boy in the slave costume. Disassociation; the defense abused children learned, the ability to escape from the bodies where the abuse was taking place, to go elsewhere till the torture stopped.
Clare was running from the pain her children suffered. It was the basest form of cowardice. The shame the ranger had failed to engender when Clare wanted to abandon Tyrone flared hot in her throat. With an effort she pushed herself back into her body. As a young woman she’d played Peter Pan; she pictured herself stitching herself together as Peter had sewn on his truant shadow.
Stopping at the top of the stairs, she waited for Anna and Tyrone. Mackie sat at her heels, seeming to sense she had come back, and waited with her.
“How do you want to proceed?” Clare asked and was pleased at the sane voice she managed.
The pigeon looked surprised at the question. No doubt she had simply been planning to try to pick up the pieces of whatever Jordan smashed.
“Lay of the land,” the pigeon said. Squatting till she was on eye level with the boy, she put her hands on his shoulders. The little fellow flinched, and the ranger dropped her hands to her sides. “Tyrone, what is at the bottom of the stairs? Can you describe what’s down there?”
He looked ready to cry, or bolt, as if she had asked a trick question and he would be punished if he came up with the wrong answer. Then he said, “Like rooms and stuff?”
“Smart boy,” Anna said. “Exactly. Tell me about the rooms and stuff.”
He squinched his eyes shut and screwed his mouth up with the effort of thinking. He couldn’t be more than five or six. Clare wondered how many of those years he had spent servicing clients in the insane confines of Candy’s “fancy house.”
“There’s a big room with a piano and places to sit and have beverages brought by the boys and sometimes the girls but they sing and do other stuff mostly.”
“Beverages.” The word struck an odd chord. Perhaps the children were taught to speak in a pseudo-antique language to heighten the illusion of a time and place where being a monster could be passed off as a genteel pastime.
“What else?” Anna asked. Her voice was gentler than Clare would have given her credit for being able to make it.
“Um . . .” Again the screwed-up face. “There’s an outside. The courtyard. And there’s a fountain and benches and the guests like to sit there and we do things for them. Or they talk to each other and smoke cigars and us boys fan them sometimes. Sometimes we do dances with the girls there.”
“Is there a little girl named Vee or Dana?” Clare demanded.
Tyrone froze. The urgency in her tone had come across as dangerous to his precarious safety. “I want to take them home,” she said as reassuringly as she could over the thrum of desperation in her throat. “They’re my daughters.” As she spoke of her children a wave of dizziness hit her. Had she not caught hold of the banister she would have fallen. To speak of them here was to put them here.
Tyrone straightened his turban and petted the feather as if it were his friend. “I don’t know,” he said finally. He wanted to say yes, to say whatever it was she wanted him to say, but there was no Vee and no Dana. The dizziness turned into a wild spinning; tears came up in a flood, choking her.
“Hey!” the ranger snapped and, still crouching, punched Clare in the thigh. “The kids get new names. Tyrone-Simba, remember?”
The jab of pain slowed the merry-go-round. Clare nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Tyrone,” Anna said, her full attention back on the child. “Are there any police down there? You know, men with guns who make sure everybody does what they’re supposed to?”
“There’s the gatekeepers?” He ended his sentence with a question so, should he be wrong, he would not cause offense. Clare’s need to feel her teeth sinking into the throats of the people who dressed this baby in a slave costume and used him was sudden and narcotic. Guns, knives, clubs—none of that was personal enough; she lusted to tear them apart with her nails, hands, and teeth. Jordan’s rage boiled up from her stomach. She didn’t know if she could hold out against it; didn’t know if she wanted to.
“How many gatekeepers?” Anna was asking, but Tyrone had done as much as he could. Eyes wide, mouth shut tight, he was—disassociating.
The pigeon reached over and unbuckled Mackie’s collar. “Dog off leash will probably be the least of the laws we break tonight,” she said. “Follow your nose, Mack,” she said to the dog. “Find Dana. Find Vee.”
Mackie stared at her, tongue lolling, tail whisking across the carpet. Then he turned and trotted down the staircase.
“Do you think he knows what I asked of him?” the ranger asked, oddly more herself in the governess’s costume than in the cocktail dress of her own era.
“Does it matter?” Clare followed the dog. With a mad patter of bare feet, Tyrone zipped by, taking the next landing at a run and down out of their line of sight.
“Probably running to tell,” the ranger said from closer behind Clare than she’d expected. “He guesses we’ll do less damage to him for tattling than the powers here will for not tattling. If he’s gone to tell his governess—kids are probably more connected to her than to security—she’ll spot me as soon as she sees me. We need to split up. That way you might have a bit longer.”
Another time, Clare might have felt the need to stay with, and try to protect, the woman helping her. Not now. She descended quickly to the main floor, leaving Anna to follow as she would.
The ground level was the lobby and had been outfitted like a fine old hotel. The several rooms, separated by wide gracious arches, were carpeted in green with a cabbage rose motif in pinks and burgundies. The walls were decorated with mirrors in gilt frames. Potted palms created private nooks for overstuffed chairs. A fountain sang gently, and beyond that, in front of French doors opening onto the courtyard, was a baby grand piano.
Men and children were the only people to be seen.
Two men in flared top hats stood, one foot on a brass rail, at a bar of dark wood. Behind it was a painting of a reclining nude, the model no more than ten years old. The bartender, obviously working on a raised platform, was a little girl.