A Door in the River

by Inger Ashe Wolfe

  Wingate felt strangely numb. He was the winner. Nine hundred dollars. Plaskett appeared at his side.

  “Way to go, rookie,” he said. “Let’s go see what’s behind door number one.” He led Wingate to the door at the side of the room. He felt eyes on him. Plaskett opened the door. The riverbed continued beyond it. It was cold again. The grade began to rise, and the ground here was a mix of solid, smooth stone and earth. The walls themselves were earthen now, and here and there a filament of dead root or a furze of mould told him they were getting closer to the fields again.

  “So I just pay cash?” he asked.

  “Cash or chips. This is for you, by the way – ” He handed Wingate another ID. This one said René Arsenault. “I heard your card didn’t work in the door. I got you another one. Save you a trip.”

  Wingate thanked him and pocketed the ID. He counted out nine hundred in twenties and fifties and held it out to Plaskett.

  The man stopped dead. “Whoa,” he said. “What’s this?”

  “Sorry?”

  “This is nine hundred.”

  “What should it be?”

  “You bid nine thousand, Mr. Lupertans.” He looked at Wingate’s face. Wingate imagined he’d gone white.

  “Nine thousand.”

  “Feldman didn’t tell you?”

  “Oh, I guess uh, I wasn’t totally clear on the procedure, you know?”

  “Well, Chester bid eight thousand. I can’t take nine hundred.”

  “I have more,” Wingate said hurriedly. He had to make this buy. “I have about thirty-five. Can I just have a, you know, a taste?”

  “A taste?” Plaskett started walking again. The cold, dark riverbed looked like it was going to go on forever. But then Plaskett stopped at what looked like an alcove in one of the curved earth walls. Wingate came up beside him and saw Plaskett was standing beside a giant concrete slab that had been set in the side. Someone had blasted or dug a hole in the earth and plugged it with concrete. “What the fuck, Pete? – René, sorry. That’s one-third of your bid.” Wingate’s sinking feeling was only intensifying now. He had no idea what his depth was now, but he hoped his tracer was still transmitting. He might very well be on his own, and right at the moment when they were going to finally learn what was going on under these fields. Ronnie flicked his fingers at Wingate, and when Wingate didn’t move, he shoved him with tented fingers against his chest and he stumbled backwards. “Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “Who the fuck are you? Why don’t you know how this works?”

  He looked down on the hand that was pushing him backwards. There was no point coming this far and having to go back. “Fucking mumbling Feldman,” Wingate said. “I’m really sorry, Ronnie. I want to do this. But the fact is, I’ve just got thirty-five right now. Can I pay the rest tomorrow?”

  “You want a taste, you ask for a taste. You don’t come in and make a deal. You ask for a fucking taste.”

  “I know.”

  “Show me the cash.”

  Wingate removed the money as casually as he could. He had seven hundred in chips, too. Altogether he had thirty-six hundred.

  “Fine, Mr.… Arsenault. You can have a taste. But don’t fuck around, okay?” There was another card reader here and Plaskett produced a card of his own and ran it through. “Your card doesn’t work in this one. In or out.” Plaskett opened the door and went through and Wingate followed. He’d never done illicit drugs. Pot a couple of times in university. Now he was going to have to put something in him and withstand it, no matter what it was. He was starting to work on the odds of his getting out of here alive. He went through the door. Somehow, impossibly, he was standing in someone’s laundry room. Enclosed with more particleboard at the bottom of a set of wooden steps. With his mouth as close to his cellphone as possible, he said, “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette do you?”

  “Gene’ll give you one,” Plaskett answered.

  They climbed the rickety steps. At the top, they went through into a darkened vestibule. Someone flicked a light on, and Wingate came up to see that he was standing in a living room in someone’s house. His mind was spinning. Whose house was this? There were farmhouses here and there in the fields. This had to be one of them, but which one? There were a couple of couches and a large-screen television on the wall, playing soccer mutely. There was another man here, and this one was armed with a gun of some type that was holstered on his hip.

  “Hey,” said the man Wingate presumed was Gene.

  “He’s just here for a taste.”

  “A taste?”

  “Takes all kinds. René, this is Gene.”

  “Hullo,” said Gene. He offered a hand.

  “Hi,” Wingate replied. He was in a movie now.

  “Put him in that room over there,” Ronnie said. “I’m just going to go downstairs.”

  He felt Gene’s hand take him lightly under the arm and then he was walking across a wooden parquet floor. He felt a couple of the wooden pieces shift under his step. He couldn’t calm his mind. “Mind taking off your shoes?” asked Gene. “There’s a carpet.”

  Wingate slid off his shoes. An elaborate and illicit scheme was unfolding before his eyes, and he was taking his shoes off so as not to soil a carpet. The floor under his feet was cool. He held his shoes dangling from one hand. He had to be careful to keep the hidden transmitter with him. “Got a cigarette?” he said again, when Gene was on the same side as the pocket the phone was in.

  “Menthols,” said Gene.

  “Oh. Never mind,” Wingate replied, secretly grateful.

  Gene opened a door and led him into a room. The lights were off in here; the man flicked them on.

  They were in a guestroom of some kind. There was a fireplace to his right with two nice chairs in front of it, facing each other. A neatly made four-poster bed with some throw pillows on it took up the wall in front of him, and across from the fireplace, to his left, was a couch. He felt like he was in a hotel room. Gene left before he’d had a chance to get a look at his weapon, but he was pretty sure it was a little stun gun. The weapon that had killed Henry Wiest and put his wife in hospital. The connections were manifesting.

  Wingate tentatively sat in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, and then went to the couch. The only light in the room came from a fixture in the ceiling, a frosted glass globe. There was no window, as there had been no window in the other room.

  Gene opened the door a crack. “Just wait here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, and he had said no truer thing of late.

  Both the trace and the phone call had dropped off in the temporary office in Dublin. Forbes and Hazel Micallef had heard the footsteps after Wingate had won his bid, and then the signals had started to fray. The last thing they’d heard was the word hundred, and then his voice was gone. The tracer fell off ten seconds later. James Wingate had vanished a hundred metres north by northwest of the corner of the Tenth Line and Sideroad 6. Hazel removed the headphones.

  “Jesus, he’s alone down there.”

  Forbes said, “We should go in.”

  “No.” She tapped the screen and tried to will Wingate’s location back onto it. “Let’s give him twenty minutes.”

  Wingate heard footsteps coming closer to the door, and he stood. He couldn’t stay seated. Whatever this was, it was not going to start with him sitting on a couch.

  The door opened and he straightened, seeing a brief blur of activity in the doorframe, movement that resolved into the form of a girl. There was a girl struggling against Ronald Plaskett. She was on the end of his arm, his fingers clutching her wrist. He shoved her into the room.

  “Don’t go too hard on her, my friend,” he said. “She’s got a bruised cunt. If you like her, top up your bid, and you can have the fresh stuff.” He pushed the girl into the room. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  He closed the door, and Wingate heard the lock turn. The girl, dressed in a loose nightgown, stood in front
of him with her eyes cast down, breathing hard. In his paralysis and astonishment, he could find nothing to say. The girl gave a deep sigh and reached down to the hem of her nightie and it was already over her head by the time he understood what she was doing, and what she expected him to do. She stepped forward and into him, pushing his hands away from the middle of his chest. Her eyes were empty and distant.

  “I really need a cigarette,” said Wingate.

  INTERLUDE

  He lay on the bed watching her. She moved toward him slowly, shifting her hips from side to side. She knew how beautiful she was, what happened to men when their eyes fell on her. She liked the feeling. It was the one area of her life where she felt like she had complete control.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Do you like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to do to me?”

  “Whatever you’ll let me.”

  She laughed and crept up onto the bed, catlike. “Maybe I’ll only let you look.”

  “That would be enough,” he said, reaching for her.

  She collapsed against him and pressed her lips hard against his. It was Reading Week, and they had nine full days in his apartment, the outside world was gone, forgotten. Exams had nearly killed her and she was ready to be coddled. She let Matthieu do all the cooking, he ran her bath, he read to her from Gogol in his rotten Russian, making her laugh, filling her with delight.

  “How can you study Russian for as long as you have and still have such an awful accent, Matthieu?”

  “It makes you laugh, my darling. If it did not make you laugh, I would do it properly.”

  “Your tutor does not approve.”

  “My tutor is off this week. This week I tutor the tutor. In other matters.”

  They made love in the kitchen, on the floor of his living room, in the bathtub. He fit the cliché of the Frenchman: experienced, fearless, possessed of immense stamina. He wore her out. During the school year she had to be careful: he left her drained and hollow and she hardly had the mind for her schoolwork afterwards. She was in her last year of nursing, and the final exams were in May. She’d kept a high average for all three years of the course, and she hoped that when she finished, she would find a good job in one of the rehab facilities in Lviv. She’d been a runner in high school and had missed a scholarship to the university when she injured herself, tearing a hamstring and blowing out a knee. She’d recovered excellently, and while going back and forth to her physical therapy, she’d met the most wonderful and caring people. They’d nursed her expertly and lovingly back to health. By the end of it all, eight weeks of going twice weekly, she had begun to run again, lightly, knowing she’d never compete.

  There were many more patients much worse off than her, though, and it was watching these men and women – victims of car accidents, falls, industrial mishaps, diseases like ALS and Parkinson’s – that gradually convinced her that she could lead another kind of life. She talked it over with her friends, and her boyfriend at the time, and he encouraged her. The next year, she enrolled as a student at the Lviv State University of Physical Culture.

  She’d felt bad for her ex, Oleg. She knew they weren’t going to last, and when she met Matthieu through the tutoring program in her second year, she let him down as easily as she could, but he’d been destroyed. Matthieu had helped her deal with the stress of having a depressed ex, and she’d appreciated it, but finally she’d had to be hard on Oleg and tell him she didn’t want to hear from him anymore.

  She was thinking of Matthieu as she lay on the hard bed in a motel outside of Kehoe River. She’d doubled back a ways and would have to be more in the open for her final act. She needed to rest again: despite her freedom, it only renewed her to a point. The weeks of mistreatment had worn her down. She didn’t know if the nausea she’d been feeling was psychological – killing was not something that she’d ever imagined herself capable of – or just the fact that she’d eaten real food for the first time in more than two months. She was spent, mentally and physically, and she knew she was going to have to be sharp to get to the end of this. She had figured out where her next destination was, and it was close to here. It had taken forty minutes by car to get there from the rooms, but in this town, she was closer. She was going to have to have an airtight plan, or she was going to get recaptured, either by whatever law was certainly on her by now or, worse, by Bochko. Bochko would kill her slowly. He would hold her up in the air with one arm, as he had done before to her and some of the other girls, and crush the bones in her neck with his thumbs until she died, his inscrutable, curious stare studying her like she was a small, natural phenomenon. She’d get Bochko if she had the chance, but if it didn’t come up before she got away, she’d have to live with it. Maybe one of the girls would get lucky one day and tear the eyes out of his head.

  What was troubling her right now was the fact that, at the motel she’d stayed in, she’d finally had a chance to check her email and there was nothing from Matthieu, which confirmed for her the worst fears she’d had. Because, who writes to a dead woman?

  How could she have been so blind? Something this ominous she should have been able to pick up in another person. How could she have been so blind with love for so long that he could have done this to her? The idea to come to Canada had been his, and he’d taken care of many of the details. He’d even paid for the trip. Now she wondered how well Bochko had repaid him. Even as she followed these dread thoughts, another arose: what if Matthieu had done nothing? And what if, to cover their tracks, her captors had harmed him? She swung back and forth between rage and anxiety. If he were innocent, his silence was ominous. If he were not, then one day she would confront him and know the truth. Just from the look in his eyes.

  Matthieu was a problem for later, however, and she made herself focus on the present. You are Larysa Kirilenko, you are a graduate nursing student from Ukraine. When you go home, you will restart your life, and none of this will have happened. She was glad, for the first time ever, that her mother was dead. The thought that she would have to lie to her about her tribulations here was devastating to think of. Of course, her silence would have told her mother volumes. She imagined the nervous breakdown, and was grateful her mother wouldn’t suffer it. She hadn’t spoken to her father in years: her mother’s death had accelerated his alcoholism, and she had given up on him in her late teens. She would not want to – or need to – rely on him for anything.

  It couldn’t have been Matthieu. She knew when she was loved. You don’t spend almost a year with a person, sharing every intimacy, laughing and crying with them, and not notice some small detail that would make them capable of betrayal of the kind she’d suffered. That’s not something that happens behind the scenes, something you hide from a person whose body you’ve treated with such worshipful attention.

  A man had been at the airport in Toronto, in the arrivals area, holding a sign with her name on it. She’d been very impressed. “Was this Matthieu’s doing?” she’d asked him in English as he opened the limo door.

  “Of course,” the man had said.

  “Such a good man Matthieu is,” she said in her still-rudimentary English.

  As he drove her away to her fate, she could not have known that the man – whom she would learn to call Earl in the coming weeks – was driving her far from her supposed destination.

  She had suffered greatly in the ten weeks she’d spent in the underground rooms, but nothing had preyed on her mind more savagely than not knowing if Matthieu was the person she’d thought he was. And it had been his memory that had kept her going all this time!

  She pushed herself off the bed and walked hunched to the bathroom. What wouldn’t she do for a nice bathroom, with a warmed tile floor and a bidet. Oh god, a bidet would be a blessing, better than a cold bottle of rosé, like Matthieu had promised her the first night they were in Paris together.

  She’d chosen this rotten motel for a reason. She’d wanted to see it again.
This was the place that Earl had taken her to, when he’d driven her from the airport. It was still there: Dear Room 9, check-out is 11 a.m. Thank You. The Management, Forty Winks Motel, Kehoe River. Room 9. Where the horror of her situation first became clear to her.

  “Good luck,” Earl had said to her, the same neutral tone in his voice that he’d had in the car when he’d informed her that she was being taken to her dormitory. He closed her in this empty room and told her to wait. Then, five minutes later, the door had opened and a powerful-looking, hard-looking man had stepped into the room.

  Over the next few days, she remained in the motel room and the man came to see her. He told her to call him Bochko, which meant “father” in Ukrainian. But this was not a Ukrainian man. He was from this side of the ocean. He was strangely beautiful, and his beauty made him more terrifying to her. He began to break her as if she were an animal, coming to her unannounced at all hours of the day. If she resisted him, he struck her; if she wept, he would close his hand around her throat and choke the tears off. When she had stopped struggling, he trained her to please him, and to do it without being asked, and to pretend to enjoy what was done to her. By the end of the fourth day, she was broken and living in a horror-filled dream, a nightmare. He called her Kitty, and she did not correct him. That would be her name here. Larysa was gone.

  She’d never once in her life been struck by another human being. An only child, she’d never had a sibling to beat up or be beaten up by. The blows stunned her. Later, in the mirror, she saw the weeping wounds on her face. There were bruises all over her legs and arms. When she washed her face, the basin ran red with her blood.

  She was not allowed to sleep. Bochko was insatiable. He never slept, it seemed to her, was always ready to go at her. He did everything, even things she had once liked, and at every opportunity, if she flagged or became inward, he would remind her what the consequence was. Enjoying him meant moving her body, begging him for more, and when she could not do it, he punished her. When, on the morning of the third day, he appeared looking freshly bathed, she had begged him to kill her.