“There must be something,” I say, pulling my tie loose, like a slightly drunk guy at the end of the night.
“Well, it’s a really small room —”
“There’s a bed?”
“That’s about all there is,” he says with a smile.
“I’ll take it.”
I try not to feel victorious. I try, really, not to feel anything. That’s what I’m supposed to do as a journalist. Be unbiased. Be removed.
I put down my credit card and manage not to wince at the price of the room.
“Is this room free for the week?” I ask.
“It’s booked on Friday for our grand opening.”
Six days away. I can crack Penny McConnell in six days.
“I’ll take it.”
“For six nights?”
“Is that a problem?”
“We…well, we didn’t anticipate guests this week between the soft and hard opening.”
I don’t give a shit about the hard and soft opening and what they expected.
“Are you saying no?”
“Absolutely not.” The man’s customer service skills kick in and he smiles graciously and swipes my credit card information.
“Ok,” the guy says, clacking away on his keyboard. “There you go Mr. Malik.”
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the two different names. Quadir is my mother’s maiden name and I use that for foundation work? That seems legit. But an internet search of either name and I’m found out. I have to hope no one cares enough to try to find out who I really am.
I take the key with the thick red ribbon attached and follow the man’s instructions to the tiny room at the rear of the building. It’s down a stairwell from the main floor. Not quite a basement…maybe more of a cellar.
I turn a corner and, standing against the only room door in the small hallway under the stairs, is a woman in a long sequined gown. The gown is silver and tight and gives the impression of a waterfall.
For a second I think it’s Penny and my heart beats so hard against my chest it’s ridiculous. But then I realize the woman has dark hair, straight as an arrow and cut off at her chin in one sharp line.
And she has my suitcase beside her. My regular beat-up, been-all-over-the-world suitcase.
I stop in my tracks because I should have known. I should have seen this coming.
Dread, my old friend, returns.
“Hello, Simon,” she says with a smile. Her body twists as she straightens from the door and the sequins ripple, throwing light around the small hallway, like a disco ball.
“Hello, Carissa. Funny running into you here.”
“Not really.”
“You look beautiful.” And she does. Red lips. Dark hair. An aura of danger.
“Thank you. And you…” She scans me up and down and smiles like she can’t quite believe her eyes. “You grew up all right, didn’t you, Simon Malik?”
“Well, a growth spurt and a gym membership helped.”
“Contacts, and a decent haircut, too.”
“Thanks for pointing it out,” I say drolly, running my hand through the thick flop of my dark hair. “That looks like my suitcase.”
“Because it is. I thought you might need a few things.”
“Were you here all night?” I ask.
“A few hours.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I didn’t want you to.”
“So? You’re checking up on me?”
“Perhaps a little.” She shrugs nonchalantly but I’m suddenly cold. Chilled in the way I am whenever I meet the emissaries of despots.
“I’m here,” I say, holding out my arms, as if showing her I have no weapons. “I showed up. No need for a babysitter.”
“That’s not what Bates is worried about. He’s worried you might lie about the girl. Decide your revenge is more important than your debt.”
Something in my face gives me away, and her smile drops.
“Lying to Bates is a bad idea, Simon,” she says. “It’s…unhealthy.”
I laugh because this garden variety bad-guy talk of hers is stupidly effective. My balls are crawling inside my body.
“It’s the chef?” she asks, but it’s not really a question.
“What is Bates going to do to her?” I ask. Because I want to find out the truth, but I don’t want that woman hurt. Ruined, yes. But not hurt in the way Bates would hurt her.
“Bates isn’t going to do anything. You are.” Carissa shrugs. “Open the door, will you? We need to talk.”
The thin ribbon slides over my palm and I am reminded of Penny’s skin. The scarlet ribbon across my hand looks like the burn she had on her thumb.
“Is there a problem?” Carissa asks.
Yes. A lot of them.
“No. No problem.” I unlock the door and open it, standing aside so she can go in first.
“I don’t remember you being so polite,” she says.
I don’t remember you being so fucking chilling, I almost say, but it wouldn’t be true.
Once she’s inside the room, she starts turning on lights. Soft gold puddles thrown across the floor and the ceiling. The white sheets of the bed.
“Well, he wasn’t wrong about the size of the room,” I say. There’s barely room for the two of us, the queen size bed and the small dresser with a TV on it.
I toss the suitcase in the corner and my cell phone chimes, indicating a new message on my work email.
“I just sent you an email,” she says, her head bent over her phone.
I laugh, a huffing, exasperated thing and open up my email. There’s a new email blank but for a video attachment.
“Go ahead,” she says and I click on the link. In a few seconds my screen is filled with a video of a woman in an orange jumpsuit who manages to carry herself like she’s not sitting in a prison interview room. Its time-stamped three years ago from Montrose Women’s Prison.
“How the hell do you have —”
She shoots me a pointed look that says plenty about me and my dumb questions.
“We can have you moved,” a voice says, off camera. I see two hands folded over a manila envelope on one side of a table. All I can tell is that it’s a man. A man wearing a thousand-dollar watch. “But I can’t guarantee there won’t be another attempt made on your life.”
“That’s right,” the woman who fills the screen says. She has dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. And even without makeup, even in a prison jumpsuit, she’s stunning. Absolutely gorgeous.
This is Marianna Andreas.
“Tell that son of a bitch,” she says, sitting up straight, her legs crossed at the knee like she’s at a tea. “I have a life insurance policy and if he tries something like that again, all the shitty things he’s done will be leaked to the police, the FBI and every major media company in North America.”
“Is this for real?” I ask, my body in a kind of suspended free fall.
“Keep watching,” Carissa says, like the good part is coming up.
“You’ve taken the fall for his tax evasion and collusion. Corruption.”
“And you think that’s all Dale Simpson is guilty of? There’s plenty more and that’s why he wants me killed, because I’m the only one who knows. Well.” She smiles. A coy cat with her nose covered in cream. “Not the only one. Not anymore.”
“So you’ve told someone else?”
“Let’s just say I’ve given someone close to me the tools to bring Dale down.”
The video ends. My screen is dark.
“That’s real?” I ask.
She nods.
“And this life insurance policy. This…means to bring down Simpson. You think Penny has it?”
“Bates thinks so. But he’d like you to find out for sure.”
“And then?”
“Get the information from her.”
I think of how sweet she tasted. The curve of her body against mine as she came. How she walked away regretting me.
Ashamed.
And now I am going to make that so much worse.
“What else do you know?” I ask.
“Marianna and Simpson met in Athens. She was a cocktail waitress in a hotel where he liked to stay. Once she got pregnant, Marianna moved back to a family farm outside of Athens. She and Tina stayed there until Tina was almost seven and Simpson moved them both to San Francisco. It’s fairly obvious he was grooming Marianna to take a fall for him. Simpson kept them in an apartment in the city.”
“And?”
“What?”
“They were close? They were a happy, little family? He gave her a pony?”
Carissa just stared at me. “Does it matter?”
It did. I wasn’t sure why it mattered, or where it fit, but this girl’s childhood mattered. All of our childhoods matter.
“Do you know the nature of what she’s been given? Is it files? A USB stick?”
“We believe it’s a laptop Marianne had.”
“A laptop?” That’s a gift. It’s easy to hide a USB stick. Slightly less easy to hide a laptop.
Carissa nods, her silky black hair brushing across her cheeks.
“Is there a time frame?” I ask.
“He only expects you to get it done. There’s no time frame. And I can’t stress to you enough that there’s no try…there’s no failure. Not with Bates.”
“You don’t have to worry,” I say. “I’m not doing this for Bates.”
CARISSA LEAVES and I open up my bag to see what she packed.
My dark jeans. My other dark jeans. A couple long-sleeved Henley’s, a red flannel I’ve barely worn. The nice sweater an old girlfriend gave to me. My navy suit and the purple tie. A T-shirt and workout shorts. Shoes and my laptop.
The red revenge notebook. All the clippings from my revenge wall.
And the broken snow globe.
She dug it out of my fucking trash.
I stand back, in my wrinkled tux and rub my eyes, put my hands through my hair and try to get my head on straight. To forget that moment in the garden, the touch of her hand and the flood of emotion.
All that matters now is the truth.
Does she have the laptop?
Is her father’s blood money paying for this place?
I will tear her to pieces if she’s in business with her father. I will do whatever I need to do to bring that man down.
The decision is made in my gut. In my bones.
I drop my hands, take off my jacket then hang it on the hooks on the wall. And I clear off the desk and spread out every clipping I have on Marianne Andreas.
Just like that I am back in the revenge business.
NINE
Penny McConnell
ON MY SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, I started a fire.
This is kind of the most important thing about me. This fire. It explains a lot.
I don’t remember the details, though it is a tale my mother used to trot out at every possible occasion. Any time a friend wanted to tell a story about an ungrateful or unruly child; “Oh,” my mother would say, “you think that’s bad?”
And out would come the seventh-birthday party and the fire I started in the kitchen.
Mom framed it as an act of rebellion. An indicator of later personality clashes. A fuck-you to my martyred mother who’d worked so hard to make the fairy princess birthday party — a fairy princess extravaganza.
There’d been tulle and glitter and crowns. And it all got ruined by the sprinkler system.
I don’t remember all that.
What I remember is we’d just moved to the States from Yaya’s house in the mountains of Greece. And I was homesick for the goats and the sunshine and Papa’s voice.
But my own father was in San Francisco and that made Mama so happy.
“Now,” she’d said on the plane, stroking my hair, “Now he’ll take care of us.”
For the party my mom invited every girl in my new class. Every girl in our new fancy building with the doorman out front and the foyer with a real fountain.
Basically every girl we knew and I didn’t understand it then, but I do now, my mom had been bribing them into liking me. Throwing an extravagant party so they’d be kind to her oddball daughter.
Classic Mom.
And it might have worked if I hadn’t ruined it all.
When the girls showed up they were so nice. They really were. They complimented my dress. And my hair, which Mom had curled and teased and worked into an elaborate, grown-up style. They didn’t stare at my birthmark because Mom had covered it up with makeup.
They asked to see my room and they squeed over the doll house Papa had made with his hands.
It was great. Awesome even. The most beautiful birthday party I’d ever had.
It was all a seven-year-old girl could want.
And it made me sick with anxiety.
And the better it got, the sicker I got. The more worried I got. I began to imagine all the ways it would go wrong.
My father, the angry, distant stranger I barely knew, could show up early and demand everyone leave. Or he could not show up later when he was supposed to and make my mom cry and rage.
Or Mom could open the bottle of wine in the fridge and drink the whole thing.
Or one of the girls could ask a question about my mom and dad I didn’t know how to answer. Or was told I couldn’t answer. Or one of the other moms might say something that offended my mom and Mom would stand up and start swearing in Greek and kick them all out of our new apartment.
All of those things could happen and the more I thought about them, the more it seemed that they would. That they were inevitable.
And I knew I couldn’t tell my mom that I wanted everyone to leave — it would break her heart. She’d worked so hard and she was so happy here in this new life. And she didn’t like it that I was so unhappy.
I considered getting in a fight with one of the girls. Calling them a name. Maybe punching one in the nose like my mom taught me to punch the boys back in Greece. But they were all so sweet. So nice.
So, I got sicker and sicker until I ran into the bathroom and threw up, getting puke on my pretty, rainbow tulle skirt. Messing up the makeup my mother insisted I wear even though I told her that all the other little girls wouldn’t be wearing makeup. To which she’d replied, “Those other little girls don’t look like you.”
It wasn’t a compliment.
I went to the kitchen to find a towel to clean up my skirt. And in the kitchen the birthday cake sat on the glass cake stand that had been Yaya’s. It came out every year for my birthday and this year instead of one of Yaya’s homemade cakes with the lemons and the flowers, my cake was a big rainbow thing that Mom bought at the fancy bakery down the street.
“We have plenty of money now,” Mom said. “We don’t need to make our own cakes. Or our own clothes. We don’t need to milk goats and grow vegetables.”
I didn’t know what that meant except that Yaya didn’t make my cakes anymore. And I missed it. And at that moment I missed it so much it hurt.
But next to the cake on the pretty table with all the presents, there was the lighter Mom would use to light the candles. It was the long one that lit the barbecue out on the small back porch.
Nauseous and near tears, smelling of vomit and my mother’s perfume, I picked up the lighter and thought…this will get everyone to leave.
It worked.
I ruined everything so no one and nothing else could.
Tonight, the fundraiser dinner is arguably the best night of my life. Certainly of my spotty career.
And all I can think of is that birthday party.
Because when things are too good, when I’m too happy, I find myself looking for a lighter, so I can burn it all down.
And the man behind the kitchen tonight…he’d been a very good lighter.
Fuck, I think, walking back from the Dumpster through the bright moonlight. I wish I could just cut him out of the night, like an ex-boyfriend out of a good picture.
B
ut he’s coloring everything.
And I am trying not to be ashamed. I am trying…and failing. Because of all the things I should be thinking about tonight, all the successes, the only thing I can think of is that man’s hand down my pants. His other over my mouth and I absolutely burn… I am ignited in shame and delight.
I don’t even know his name.
This is so like me; I can’t stand it.
The most important night of my life and I’m all but begging some man to make me come.
My cheeks are hot, my eyes burn.
It’s hard to believe that nothing else went wrong.
I mean, things got pretty messed up during dinner service, but it wasn’t a disaster. And in my life, if things aren’t literally on fire, it’s a win.
Still, I spent the whole night just waiting for everything to fall apart. Because that’s my gift. My curse. There’s a good chance just about everything I touch will crash and burn.
But it never happened. Not tonight.
Jeff showed up stoned and I was like, “Here we go.”
But everyone rallied. Even Evi on the grill, that could have been a mess, but she rose to the occasion like a total champ.
And then kicking Jeff out? Punching him? The jerk deserved it, but still. Right after dessert? With an inn full of guests about to leave? It could have blown up in my face.
But it didn’t. Against all the odds and every lesson of my past, it didn’t blow up. So, of course I had to give it a little nudge and get raunchy with a stranger behind a kitchen.
Because that’s how normal people behave.
But, there was no cosmic crushing. No karmic retribution.
I let a man put one hand down my pants and the other over my mouth and I came so hard I saw stars, and the roof didn’t fall in.
The night just carried on being epic.
I stare out the back window of the kitchen, up at the mountain and the stars, set so deep in an indigo sky and I wish, in the back of my mind where all the wishes I can’t say out loud are kept, that my mother was here to see it.
To see me making something of myself.
And then I wish she’d care.
“Chef?”
I jump, startled. I thought I was alone in the kitchen, service long since over. Guests who weren’t spending the night had left. Even the bar is closing down.
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