Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  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.

  Clare's heart jerked like a landed fish, but the child was several years older than Dana. Panic sickened her as she wondered if she would know her own children. These wore high complicated wigs or hairdos; their faces were powdered till they were the color of pearls. Pink lips were painted on in cupid bows, beauty marks pasted on chins or cheeks, their fragile bodies deformed by costumes. They were Hispanic, African American, Mideastern, Indian, and Caucasian.

  On a divan close to the stairs where Clare had frozen, a Latina child sat on the lap of a man in his forties, playing with the paste jewel in his stickpin as he chatted with another
man of like age seated next to them. The child wore the Victorian dress, full skirt and neckline frothed with lace, but the neckline was cut to the level of her sternum so her smooth chest and tiny nipples peeked over the ruffle. The man holding her had one hand up under her skirts. Another child, with soft brown curls piled on her head, clad in a velvet dress of midnight blue with white trim, walked by, concentrating hard to keep from spilling a drink she carried on a tray. The back of her gown and petticoats had been cut away so, as she passed, the naked little bottom and thighs above her black cotton stockings were exposed.

  Clare managed the last two steps down. In front of the ornate curving staircase, she stood in a daze, turning. On a low, richly upholstered bench, two little girls in costume played quietly together with dolls dressed as they were. Waiting for customers.

  Clare kept turning. Through the archway in the room behind the stairs another slave boy, this one Asian, tried to wield a peacock-feather fan. A trickle of blood ran down the back of his thigh, and tears ran silently down his face.

  Clare turned. A girl in Bo Peep pink, a monkey doll held tight to her shoulder, was sitting on a table with her dress rucked up around her hips, being fed sips of champagne by a laughing man in shirtsleeves and vest.

  And turned: Four girls sang and danced, ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, they all fall down, the nursery rhyme from the plague years, when children died and their bodies were thrown onto burning piles because there were too many to bury.

  And turning: A man carried a beautiful black child in his arms, nuzzling her soft face with his bearded chin, ascending the stairs.

  Turning: Clare felt herself falling.

  The boy, Tyrone, was pointing up the stairs, where Anna Pigeon was coming down. The governess was at his shoulder.

  Clare staggered to the bench where the girls played with their dollies and slumped down as blackness closed around her.

  From somewhere she heard Mackie crying.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Having counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, all the way to twenty-Mississippi, Anna started down the stairway. Heroes in books and movies never counted one-Mississippi--at least not out loud--but Anna had learned that twenty seconds of waiting to do something stupid and dangerous was entirely different than twenty seconds to catch a bus. At a rough guess, about seventeen thousand times longer. More like holding one's breath underwater. She descended carefully, the long gray skirt held tightly in her fists so she wouldn't trip.

  As she moved delicately down the carpeted steps, trying to look as if she belonged in a nineteenth-century gown in a nest of pedophiles, she brought to mind the photographs of Dana and Vee that Clare had shown her. Both had dark eyes and heart-shaped faces. The younger one--Vee--had lighter hair, cut shorter and with a touch of natural curl.

  The faces would not come into focus. Young children--lucky young children--had yet to have identifying marks carved into their flesh in the form of scars, droops, and broken noses, lines carved by care, capillaries broken by sun and smoke, eyes dulled by disappointment. Other than to those who loved them dearly, one child could look pretty much like another of like age and coloring.

  Anna resolved simply to whisper their names in the ears of any likely candidates. If they were here, they hadn't been prisoners long enough to have forgotten their birth names.

  Unless they were so traumatized they'd forgotten everything.

  Anna chose not to think about that.

  Reaching the halfway point, where the stairs curved in a graceful sweep so that one might make an entrance in style, she stopped. The real governess, a grim look on her face, was staring up at her, following Tyrone's pointing finger.

  Snatching her dress tail into a great wad, Anna fled back upstairs. The governess didn't cry out or otherwise disturb the clients but ran after her. Anna could hear her feet striking the carpet. The woman ran lightly and without effort--Anna was only a woman, after all, and the governess could see she was younger than her quarry and taller and outweighed her by fifteen pounds.

  But I am old and mean and on the side of the angels, Anna thought as she turned the corner at the top of the stairs and grabbed up a waist-high porcelain vase filled with yellow silk gladiolas. Pressing her back against the wall, she held the narrow mouth of the vase so she could swing it like a baseball bat. She'd scarcely planted her feet when the governess, skirts whirling, rounded the corner into the second-floor hall. Anna swung hard.

  The governess threw up an arm. The vase struck in a shower of silk blossoms. The governess grunted with the impact, but the power of the blow was deflected upward. Before Anna could pull it back to try for a more vulnerable area, the woman closed on her with the speed and confidence of an individual accustomed to physical violence. She didn't try to punch or pry the vase from Anna's hands; she just plowed in, her shoulder ramming Anna's chest. Air exploded from Anna's lungs, and for a terrifying moment she couldn't breathe. Whipping a forearm over Anna's windpipe, the governess leaned in with all her weight, her heels braced on the carpet, her face so close Anna could see the tiny hole in the woman's nostril where she wore a ring and smell the Juicy Fruit gum she'd been chewing.

  Anna had done the very thing she'd scorned the governess for; she had underestimated her adversary. Without enough air to fill her burning lungs or fuel her scattering thoughts, Anna could black out. Once down, she would probably never get up again. She would be murdered in a reeking children's brothel by a twit half her age with a goddam nose ring.

  "Enough," Anna growled through clenched jaws and narrowing windpipe. Walking her fingers, spiderlike, along the underside of the arm crushing her throat, she found the woman's hand. Then she found the web between thumb and forefinger.

  Too busy killing her to bother noticing these tickles, the governess didn't even twitch her fingers out of Anna's way. Feeling for the soft spot where she'd learned the pain would be most intense, Anna pinched as hard as her failing consciousness allowed.

  The woman grunted. The arm moved. Not much, but enough Anna could suck in a lungful of air, the literal second wind. Using this newfound strength, she focused every erg of it on the tiny patch between her finger and her thumb. Pain compliance; when negotiations failed there was nothing like it.

  Finally, screaming as much in anger as in pain, the governess backed off, her need to stop the pain overcoming logic. Anna squeezed harder, and she went down on one knee.

  "Shut up," Anna said. She stepped behind the woman, dropped her hand, and locked her forearm across the governess's throat, pulling it tight with her opposite hand on the wrist. Twisting, the governess managed to get her chin into the crook of Anna's arm, but she'd stopped making noise.

  All at once, she went limp, dead weight slumped forward. Anna hoped it was the sleeper hold and not a ruse. Her hopes were dashed in a swift hard shove. Staggering back, Anna caught her bare foot in the bottom of the dress, and the two of them fell to the carpet. The sleeper hold broke, and the governess shoved her fists between Anna's arm and her own throat.

  Anna abandoned the hold for the tried and true fighting style of women and cats. Catfights were mocked in a man's world, but Anna had had too many cats not to give them the respect they were due. More than once she'd seen a six-pound tabby turn into a storm of claws and teeth that made grown men quail and large dogs flee the room.

  With a low guttural cry, she sank her teeth into the first bare bit of flesh she found, an ear. She raked her nails where she could, pulled hair, slapped, and all the while growled low and fierce.

  Under the insane onslaught, coming as it did from behind, the governess lost her will to stay in the clinch. Throwing herself forward, hampered by the yards of fabric that wadded up around them, she tried to crawl free.

  A small bit of her ear remained between Anna's teeth. She spit it out. It was not something she would think about now. Or ever, for that matter. Struggling up from her knees, she hurled herself after the crawling woman. Now that the governess knew it
wasn't a prank or a game, but in deadly earnest, she would run for security. Probably the only thing that kept her from shouting the house down was the ingrained need to keep things on a seemingly even keel for what had to be a skittish clientele. Politicians, moguls, movie directors, doctors, lawyers--all the bigwigs could recover from an affair made public. Many could recover from being indicted for fraud, tax evasion, drunk driving, and wife beating. Nobody recovered if the public got even a whiff of the kind of perversion Anna'd seen tonight.

  The taste of blood in her mouth, Anna threw herself on the governess's back and grabbed the bun at the nape of her neck. Using it as a handle she smashed the other woman's head against the hardwood floor beside the carpet runner. And again. And again. Blood gushed from the governess's nose and lips. Anna banged her head down once more, and she went limp. This time she wasn't playing possum.

  Exhausted, Anna let her weight fall on the inert form beneath her. The battle had lasted no more than sixty seconds, but she had not held back; there were no reserves, and her breath was coming in great gasps. It was probably that which saved the governess from being killed. Customarily, Anna didn't like killing, maiming, or even causing psychological pain to others. She much preferred life flow along in a peaceful vein with time for listening to the birds sing and watching cocoons open to butterflies, and butterflies as their newborn wings dried. Here in the "fancy house" she wanted to kill or, rather, was indifferent to whether she killed or not. The crimes were too heinous, the hope of rehabilitation too slim, the damage to the victims too great. Some evils deserved no second chances; they merely needed expunging.

  Recovering, she rolled off the unconscious governess. The woman smelled of sweat and expensive perfume. Now Anna smelled of it as well. Under other circumstances she might have liked the scent. From now on she would associate it with vile odiousness. With difficulty she found her feet in the morass of skirts and got up. Breathing returning to normal, she could hear again and listened to see if their tussle had set off any alarms. There was no yelling, no sound of running feet. From below came raucous laughter, the kind she associated with viciousness, but that might have just been her state of mind.