It was just their life, exactly re-created. To the last detail.
Same apartment. Same suits. Same view of the city.
Same celebrity endorsements.
All of it identical.
Except without her.
She’d been erased.
So she returned the favor.
I stand in Hoboken. Stare into the icebox.
My reliquary.
Take a moment.
Feel the cold.
When I don’t feel it anymore, I close the door.
That’s the lesson.
The gospel truth taught to me by my personal patron saint.
No matter what you have, or how lucky you think you are, there’s nothing in this world you can hold on to so tightly that it can’t be taken from you.
His wife sobbed.
Why would he—
I stopped her.
Took the money.
Stood up.
Explained to her.
I don’t care.
And realized only then that it was true.
And that was the last time I listened to a backstory.
Or let anyone pay in installments. Or met with a client face-to-face.
Or laid down in a bed.
Until my meeting with Harrow in the wheat field.
As I left the café that day I stuffed her money into a deep pocket.
Apparently I’d taken to calling them clients now.
27.
Rick makes a good living running Rick’s Place in Chinatown, catering to a reliable stream of tappers, but to make extra cash he takes the occasional off-hours private tap-in job, which he scrounges up on the seedy old Internet. Servicing nervous dreamers who want to crash some porny construct they’re too embarrassed to ask for by name in the light of day. So Rick’s like the kid who opens the back exit to the movie theater, lets you sneak in and sit in the front row for free. Minus his fee, of course. He taps you in, takes his fat envelope, and quietly lets himself out.
Mina is convinced Rick’s cheating on her, which he is, so she tries to follow him to these jobs and spy on him, which she can’t.
Take tonight.
Rick’s on his third house-call when he decides to shake her, which isn’t too hard, given that if you stood across the room from her and asked her to walk toward you in a straight line, about half the time she’d get lost on the way.
Compared to that, the back alleys of the Lower East Side are a labyrinth. Rick doubles back a few times, then pops loose, free of his tail, a block from his destination address. He’s way south of Rivington, in the crummiest part of a crummy neighborhood. Tired tenements slump by the sidewalk, black-iron fire escapes stitched down their bellies like ugly sutures.
He heads into a walk-up with an apartment number on a scrap. Finds the door open so he lets himself in. He has enough time to register that the apartment is dark and entirely bare, save for a wooden rocking chair. But not enough time to turn around before Simon the Magician steps out of the darkness and slashes a sjambok across the back of his knees, which feels to Rick roughly like getting horsewhipped with a live high-voltage wire.
Another nifty trick. Most magicians disappear.
Simon appears.
Rick half-turns and manages to get his hands up this time but that only makes it worse. The sjambok is like a bullwhip that’s all handle, no whip, and on the second pass it slices a whistling gash across both of Rick’s upheld palms, the skin splitting raggedly, as though gasping in surprise.
Simon then calmly bull-rushes him, sjambok held lengthwise up against his neck and arms, Rick stuttering backward until he slams into drywall.
The cheap wall shudders.
Simon gets to the gun in Rick’s belt before Rick does.
Steps backward.
Bounces the pistol lightly in his palm.
It’s a snub-nose, for self-protection. Ironic.
Looks like a padlock with a tumor on it.
He waves Rick over to the rocking chair.
Once Rick’s hands are bound behind him with plastic cuffs, Simon commences the speech-making.
See, for me? I don’t trust guns. Too messy. All forensics and fingerprints. It’s much too easy to connect a body to a bullet, and a bullet to a gun, and a gun to a man.
He turns the gun over, studying it, like it’s an heirloom.
Not that anyone bothers about that sort of thing anymore, am I right? These days you pop someone in cold blood in broad daylight, FedEx the murder weapon to the cops, it will end up in a folder on a pile somewhere, shrugged off as someone else’s problem. But still.
He pockets the pistol.
Old habits. You understand.
He hefts the sjambok.
Now this—
Sends its tip whistling across Rick’s face. Tip bites. Halves a tattoo.
—this is more my kind of firepower. They were made to kill snakes. Most are flexible, like a whip. Made of rhino hide, just leather wrapped on leather. This one’s custom though—
Bends it. Bounces back to attention. Sounds a metallic twang.
—got a little something extra inside.
Whip whistles back the way it came. Matching slice.
Rick sputters.
Wait—I can—don’t you know—just talk to Milgram—
One last slash to shut Rick up.
Sorry. We’re long past the let’s-make-a-deal phase.
Shakes the sjambok slightly, held upright. Watches it wobble.
Then puts it down.
Retrieves a duffel bag. Pulls out a roll of duct tape. Tears off a piece. Mouth-sized.
As I said, I don’t trust guns.
Lays the tape over Rick’s mouth. Tape edges grip his cheeks where the cuts are. Tugs them wider.
I’m more of a non-lethal man myself.
Pulls out a penknife. Opens it. Cuts a slit in the tape. Second mouth.
Then he pulls a can of pepper spray from the gym bag. Jumbo-size. For crowd control.
See, this? This you can buy on the Internet. Get it sent to a PO box. No names, ID, nothing. Legal. Untraceable. And non-lethal.
He shakes the can.
For the most part.
Rests the toe of his boot on the chair’s rocker. Tilts it forward.
Tips Rick’s chin up with the nozzle.
Of course, this is the kind of thing that’s used to disperse riots. Entirely safe and more or less harmless when used on large gatherings in the open air. Isn’t that what they say?
Simon stoops and pulls a pair of plastic goggles from the duffel bag. Straps them over his eyes.
Then slowly works the nozzle of the pepper-spray can into the slit in the tape over Rick’s mouth.
Rick’s legs kick, trying to topple the chair backward, but it doesn’t topple. Just rocks.
Simon’s boot stills the rocker.
But you know what I’ve discovered?
Works the nozzle further into Rick’s mouth.
Best way to make a non-lethal weapon lethal?
One last jam. Rick gags.
Just treat the man like a crowd.
The hissing of the spray goes on long enough that the neighbors assume it’s the roach-guy making his regular visit. At least until their own eyes start to water.
When Mina catches up to him, Rick is bent double on the floor, toppled, still bound to the chair, coughing up foamy blood.
Not coughing. Coughed.
She falls and cradles his head until her palms burn. Eyes raw. She coughs, cries.
Simon stands over her.
Gives the empty can one last rattle.
Death rattle.
Then dumps it in the duffel bag.
Stows the goggles too.
Then retrieves a knife that’s nasty enough to have no other use than cutting people.
She looks up at him, eyes swollen, welling, and spits.
The fuck are you. Fuck you. I’ll fucking kill you.
He stands her up.
His ow
n eyes puffy and raw at the rims, in some parody of mourning.
He smiles.
Don’t worry.
She spits again. Not words this time.
He puts his meaty hand behind her head and clutches her skull. Then with his right hand he presses the long blade vertically against the thin skin of her forehead.
She barely squirms.
Rotates the blade counter-clockwise.
Presses again.
Sign of the cross.
Leans in. Whispers.
Go tell them what I’ve done.
On his way out, duffel bag slung over his shoulder, Simon stops briefly on the street to berate himself, like a man on his way home who forgot to buy milk.
Damn.
I should have asked him what the tattoos meant.
28.
Meanwhile at Trump Tower.
Persephone’s alone, reading. A book. Middlemarch. Almost done.
Mark’s off trawling Chinatown, again, looking for a cheap bed for an hour. Maybe two.
I’m in Hoboken staring into an icebox.
Persephone curls up in the leather chair.
Knock at the door. A voice calls.
Hey. It’s Dave the doorman. From downstairs. Got a delivery for Mark Ray.
She puts the book down, perturbed. Calls back.
Sorry. Can’t open up for anyone. Doctor’s orders.
Come on. It’s me, Dave. From downstairs.
No can do, Dave from downstairs.
Seriously, it’s me. Take a look in the peephole.
She tips up on tiptoes.
Dave’s face all funny. Dave the bug.
Flat-footed again.
Sorry, Dave from downstairs. Can’t do it.
He knocks three times on the door with a gun.
Shots echo. Door dimples. Three fresh pimples like a teen before prom.
She calls out.
Dave the dumbass. It’s steel-reinforced. Don’t you know that?
Knob turns.
Door opens.
Dave invites himself in.
Then I guess I should use the master key, huh?
But she’s gone.
He closes the door quietly and locks it behind him. Not a huge apartment, and there’s only one way out, unless you plan to rappel.
Pistol pokes its nose into the kitchen. Dave follows.
Still in his Sergeant Pepper’s uniform. Brocade at the shoulders.
Epaulets. Captain’s hat.
God, he’s always hated this thing.
Snaps the kitchen lights on. Empty, and from what he can tell, all knives accounted for in the wooden block.
Silly girl.
Hot, though. Very hot.
She should try wearing something other than sweatpants.
Out to the living room. Picture window hung like a masterpiece.
The sparkling city.
Now, a view like that, he would kill for.
Actually, that’s kind of what he’s doing right now.
Taps the bathroom door open with the gun snout. Yanks the shower curtain back, Psycho-style.
Rings rattle.
Not in there. Not that dumb.
And so into the bedroom.
Appropriate, he thinks.
Convenient too.
She knows Dave the doorman. She knows all the doormen by now, of course, but she remembers him in particular, because of the way he looks at her. It’s the same look she remembers from certain older men in her congregation. Men in the subway. Boys in the tents. Two men in a van.
From her father, that one night.
She’s seen plenty of looks in her life, learned them all, catalogued them, kept mental index cards on all their alarming variety. I want you. I want to love you. I want to fuck you. I want to hurt you.
I want you to know I want to hurt you.
Some people undress you with their eyes. Some people go a lot further than that.
Dave does, often.
So maybe, just maybe, this will work.
Dave the doorman leaves the lights out in the bedroom. Stands framed in the doorway. A square splash of city light falls on the bed, so he spots them.
Bra. Panties. Discarded.
And, from what he can tell, recently worn.
Don’t tell me I caught her in the middle of a shower.
Better yet. Bubble bath.
He steps in gingerly, makes the here-kitty-kitty noise, like in a movie. Not too many more places left where she could be. Maybe the closet.
Maybe she’s in the closet watching him right now.
He prods the panties with the gun muzzle.
Scoops them up.
Retrieves them from the end of the pistol, like a fresh-caught fish on a hook.
Balls them up.
Inhales them.
A perfumer’s inhale.
Eyes slip closed for a second.
Her hand joins his from behind, her body up against his, breasts pooled against his back, and he almost thinks, for a second, that he conjured her. Her hand is clutching his hand that’s clutching the panties and now she’s pushing them into his mouth. Panty taste.
Her other hand takes its best educated guess at where his kidney is and slides the knife in, searching.
Twists it twice, a full rotation. Like working on a stubborn screw.
To leave a more raggedy wound.
He struggles to shrug her off but she’s already disarming him. Funny what you can pick up after a few weeks living in tents.
Gun falls softly to the plush carpet.
He follows. Less softly.
She straddles him. Improvises on his neck with the blade.
She’s not a medical student, after all. But more or less anything that’s there to be cut, she cuts.
The plush soaks up most of what pumps out.
She has discovered a streak inside herself of late that she does not recognize. She tries to credit it to carrying the baby. If credit is the word.
Something instinctual, born of being a mother. Some new primal drive to protect.
Though that doesn’t quite explain it.
Those two guys in Red Hook, for example. She lingered long after she should have left them.
Working. Slowly.
And now here.
Dave the doorman. In his sad little epaulets.
She wonders where it comes from. Or if it was always there.
Latent.
Maybe her father saw it in her all along.
He kept a claw-foot tub in the basement for one purpose. Called it the Baptismal.
Bare lightbulb jumped when he yanked the chain. Black shadows danced like a campfire.
Started back before she could remember, really. Became a weekly ritual. Saturday nights. Her mother standing silent as he marched her down the stairs.
Faucet roared, openmouthed, until the tub filled to the top.
Then the timid mouse-squeak as he twisted the spigot shut.
Last drop trembling on the mouth of the faucet.
Drip.
He made her strip down. Kneel naked on a stepstool. Curl over. So he could dunk her head underwater.
One. Two. Three.
Pull her up.
One. Two. Three.
Pull her up.
All the while reciting scripture.
Her long hair, her mother’s pride, never cut, left a wet slash on the wide wooden boards of the wall as he yanked her up quickly.
Then dunked her.
One. Two. Three.
Four. Five.
If she’d been especially bad.
Then he handed back her flannel nightie, folded neatly. Freshly laundered.
Told her, Now you are clean.
Her mother never once mentioned it.
Not once, and then she died.
The weekly ritual. She almost came to—what? Not enjoy it exactly. But rely on it? Maybe that’s it. This weekly cleansing.
The comforting consistency of rules.
It let
her know that, whatever she did, she could be exonerated.
Washed clean.
Through this weekly reminder of her father’s unwavering love.
Though as a teenager, she started to feel rightly more ashamed to remove her nightgown.
And her father had to find a sturdier stepstool.
Still. Nothing happened. Not of that sort.
Maybe to Rachel.
But not to her.
Not to her.
Until he saw those pictures.
He exploded into her bedroom wielding the glowing tablet.
The light from the tablet lit his furious face.
Slapped her with a bony backhand.
First time he’d ever hit her.
Drew blood. Just a trickle though.
Then he marched her downstairs.
She accepted it meekly.
Stripped. Knelt. Prayed.
As he held her under.
One. Two. Three.
Four. Five.
Six. Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Long enough for her to worry this was more than punishment.
Still under.
Every muscle tensed.
Tendrils of blood curled and sniffed around her face like a school of curious fish.
She gasped and breathed water.
She had to breathe something.
He pulled her up.
She spat and sputtered and tasted something salty and metallic and then he pushed her under again.
One. Two. Five. Eleven. Nineteen.
She lost count.
The frigid water set her ears to ringing.
She was curled over, on her knees, naked.
With one hand he held her head under.
His other hand went wandering.
Sounds of the room muted.
He was saying something. Not scripture.
Her eyes open underwater.
Sick.
Feeling a fullness.
Edges of her sight blacking out—
—like a curtain falling.
He pulled her up.
Fingers still in her.
The next time under she just let go.
Stopped struggling. Started to float.
Loosed her breath in a school of lazy bubbles.
Perhaps she’d always deserved this.
One last bubble, like a hiccup.
The room so faraway and quiet.
Calming.
She only felt a joyful sinking.
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