Choke Point

by Ridley Pearson

  “The toilet?” Grace speaks Dutch.

  The director helps Grace by the arm, guiding her across the room. “What happened? What has happened?” She looks back over her shoulder at Knox. “Not in here.”

  Knox takes in the studying kids frozen in their seats. “He slipped and fell,” Knox tells them, “but he’s going to be all right.” He hauls the kid to his feet and leads him back out the doors, pounding him against the brick wall and allowing him to sag to the concrete. He keeps him close to the doors for the sake of the ambient light. Knox squats. The kid is still dazed from the stun stick, though no longer paralyzed. Knox unlaces the kid’s military-style boot and uses the lace to tie the boy’s hands behind his back.

  Taking the boy by the chin, he lifts and turns his face into the light. The eye is worse by the minute; the nose is clotting.

  Knox speaks Dutch. “If you play tough, it will get rough. Understand?”

  The one good eye fills with contempt. Knox grabs the boy’s crotch. Takes a handful and twists. The eye rolls back into its socket. “She tells me you touched her like this.” He twists harder. The kid groans. “One good tug and you’re singing soprano for life. Your call.” He tightens his hold. “Who put you up to this?”

  The eye rolls back, filled with an innocent terror. The kid tries to shake his head but Knox holds his chin firmly in hand. But not with his right hand; that one turns a few more degrees clockwise. “Who? And where do I find him?”

  “The purse. A little fun. That’s all.”

  Another half turn and Knox will do permanent damage. He squeezes instead. “Fun yet?”

  The color drains from the boy’s face. He’s not breathing.

  The earlier look of fright goes a long way to convincing Knox the kid was not on orders, but he doesn’t want to believe his own intuition. Fahiz was attacked and beaten. For Knox, this kid will do. An act of random violence won’t satisfy his craving for conspiracy and connection. He wants an easy route to follow back to the knot shop. He takes the kid’s wallet, but removes the cash and a debit card and stuffs them into the front pocket of the boy’s jeans. Confirms there’s ID with an address.

  “If I should ever see you again, I am coming after you with the full intention of ending your life. Do you understand?”

  The boy is slow to respond. Knox loosens his grip on his testicles. The boy’s chin tries to nod.

  Behind him, Grace stands framed by the door, looking out. She has put herself back together; her dark hair covers her forehead.

  Knox opens the door for her. Says to the director, “Do you know this boy?”

  The director shakes her head without looking. “These are hard times. There are many such boys. Too many.”

  “Fix the lights in the tunnel,” Knox says.

  The woman nods. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Do not untie him. He can make it home without his arms. Lock the door until he’s gone. If he doesn’t leave, call the police.”

  Another nod from the director. “I already have.”

  The boy struggles to get up. Knox kicks him back down. “Ladies first.”

  Knox offers his hand to Grace, and to his surprise she accepts it.

  —

  KNOX HELPS GRACE feed the key card into the hotel room door, her hand shaking too violently.

  “I can come in,” he says. “Make you a drink. You could use one.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.” She pushes open the door but doesn’t move. Knox slips past her. He checks the bathroom, the closet and the rest of the room.

  “Clear.”

  She enters. “Vodka, rocks.” She is unbuttoning her blouse as she enters the bathroom. Shuts and locks the door.

  He hears the bath water running, not a shower. She’ll be a while. He’s got her room key. He fetches ice and waits to make her drink. Takes a Scotch for himself. Drinks it from a plastic cup that he removes from a plastic wrapper.

  The water stops running.

  He hears the door lock pop as she cracks the door.

  “Thank you,” she calls out.

  “No problem.” He pours the vodka and approaches with his back to the bathroom door, then passes the drink inside. They touch hands. Hers is ice cold.

  He heads back to his chair. Hears the shower curtain sing as she slides it aside and hears her ease down into the water.

  “Why were you there?”

  “A vendor in the market. I’m not so sure she recognized Berna in the photo so much as thought the community center director might help me.”

  “Some help.”

  “The director painted a different picture,” Grace says. “The girls providing income for broken families. A way to battle the poverty.”

  “I’m not buying that,” Knox says. He tilts the Scotch in the cup and swirls it.

  “I’m not selling. But she was.”

  “It’s a load of shit.”

  “More like realpolitik. No matter, it doesn’t help us any.”

  Locals and residents, he thinks. He tells her about Sonia’s theory of two classes of workers.

  “If we can’t get help from the mothers of these girls—” Grace says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Graham Winston wants this shut down. We have our work cut out for us. If it’s finding someone to hang this on, you have a wallet in your pocket. I will testify. Fahiz, I’m not so sure.”

  “Finding Berna and closing the shop are one and the same. Concurrent.” The Scotch warms him. He uncaps another minibottle and dispenses it into the plastic cup. “Refill?”

  “Please.” He hears the shower curtain being adjusted. “You can come in.” He enters the bathroom. Her clothes are neatly folded on the counter. Grace. Her arm is extended from behind the curtain. He takes her empty cup and pulls the door nearly shut behind him. Hears her chewing ice.

  “There was a woman . . . in the market. It was she who rescued me.”

  It was she. Grace. “I’m listening.”

  “In the tunnel . . . She knew who I was. My EU persona. Warned me.”

  “Threatened?”

  “Warned.”

  “Were the boys hers? Was it staged for your benefit?”

  It’s a long time before she says anything. “I don’t like the way you think.”

  “It’s the Scotch,” he says.

  “No, I am afraid not,” she says. “She told me I ask too many questions and that I’d get myself killed.”

  “Hardly a warning. That’s a threat.”

  “It wasn’t. I’m telling you. She was hiding—waiting—in the tunnel. Waiting for me to leave the center.”

  “And we have no idea who she is.”

  “None.”

  “You’re going back to Hong Kong. We’re getting you out of here.”

  “Foolish. This is exactly what we’d hoped for. It just does not happen to be connected to the knot shop.”

  Knox’s phone buzzes. A text.

  in the lobby

  “Dulwich is downstairs.”

  “Your doing?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Assaults, robberies and sexual assaults tend to win his attention.”

  “He can’t come up,” she says. “My room could be watched. One man in my room can be explained. Two is an orgy.”

  “No one is more careful than Sarge. Let me handle it.”

  Ten minutes later, after Knox has walked the hallway and scouted the stairs, the three are in Grace’s room. The hotel doesn’t offer robes so she’s in pajamas with a towel wrapped around her head. She sits cross-legged on the bed. She looks about fourteen.

  Dulwich drinks beer. Grace and Knox are on their third. They’ve run the minibar out of vodka and Scotch. Knox feels good for the first time all day.

  Grace gives the recap.

  Knox adds in enough of his meeting with Sonia to complete the picture. He looks over at Grace. “You’ve got to go,” Knox says.

  “Not the way the EU would see it,” Dulwich explains. “They might assign a driver. That coul
d be you.”

  “Can’t be me,” Knox says. He reminds them about Gerhardt Kreiger’s efforts to connect him to a rug merchant, about his serving as Sonia’s photographer, about already being stretched thin.

  “Me, then.”

  “You limp. Some bodyguard.”

  “All the better,” Dulwich says. “I look like a driver, as it should be.” He asks Grace, “Good with you?”

  She nods. She looks like she’s in shock. Or maybe drunk is more like it, Knox thinks.

  “Can we talk about Fahiz?” Grace asks.

  “No,” Knox says.

  “Sonia Pangarkar interviews Kabril Fahiz, but Kahil’s the enigma. Are we accepting that he intentionally lied on his health clinic admittance form and on the police report, all to protect himself? Is anyone that cognizant when admitted to a clinic in such bad shape?”

  “He’s collateral damage. Forget him.” Knox sets down the rest of the Scotch vowing not to touch it.

  “Agreed,” Dulwich says. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “You didn’t speak to him. His attackers were Dutch or Europeans. He saw it as a hate crime. I don’t think so.”

  “Your attackers were Dutch,” Knox says.

  “My attackers were kids.” She wraps herself in her own limbs more tightly. She can’t rid herself of the boy holding her down there, feels on the verge of screaming or vomiting.

  “Has anyone spoken to the doctors?” Dulwich asks.

  “Waste of time,” Knox says. “We’re off track.”

  “We’re trying to stop whoever’s intimidating Sonia Pangarkar’s sources,” Dulwich says. “Kahil Fahiz was a victim of those people. Mistaken identity or not, we’re hardly off track.”

  Knox thought Sarge was on his side. The adrenaline is wearing off. The booze is swimming around his head. He upends the waiting cup. Better. “You want this short and sweet,” he tells Dulwich. “That means we go for beheading, not cutting off fingers and hands. Who gives a shit that Kahil Fahiz was mistaken for someone else? Who gives a shit what condition he was in? They got the wrong guy. How can that possibly be worth our time?”

  “What if we find out his attackers were two kids in their late teens?” Dulwich asks. “For instance.”

  “I had this kid by the short hairs. He was not hired to attack her. Trust me.”

  “Maybe he was led into it by his friend.”

  “The doctors are going to tell us that? I don’t think so. Why am I the one drinking, but you’re the one talking like a drunk?”

  “People explain their injuries. They’re in shock,” Dulwich says, casting a sideways glance at Grace, “their adrenaline’s screaming. They’re given sedatives. Their tongues wag. More secrets are spilled in the emergency room than the confessional. You two can carry on.” He sounds disgusted. “I can do this. I will do this.”

  “My cover’s better,” Grace says, still in a tight ball. There’s only ice left in her cup.

  “Suit yourself,” Knox says. “Waste of time.”

  “Ours to waste.” Dulwich is angry with him.

  “Between Sonia’s work and Kreiger wanting to sell me a container of rugs, we’re aimed at the top of the pyramid. Grace should chill out for a few days. Lose the fieldwork. We get a suspect and she goes to work on the person’s finances. If and when we have our evidence, we make our move.”

  Dulwich cannot believe what he’s hearing. “So your work is the only work that matters?”

  “For now.”

  Grace rocks forward and back on the bed. She’s biting down on the hand that holds the cup. She removes her lips long enough to say, “I found a piece of your money.” Her dark eyes, wet now from the liquor, stare over her hand at Knox.

  “Come again?”

  “Grace and I have been involved in a little extracurricular activity.”

  Knox looks suspiciously between them. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I found forty-seven thousand,” Grace says. “It’s a good lead. I’m going to find the rest. And then I’m going to find more.”

  “My money? The money Eve—?” Knox says, though he can’t finish the sentence, can’t hear himself say it.

  “If we find the money—when we find the money—we will find Evelyn Ritter along with it,” Grace says imperiously.

  Dulwich hunches his shoulders. “It was a bum deal.”

  “It was my deal. Is my deal.”

  “What are friends for?”

  Grace explains, “It was the change. The fifty-four cents. It’s all in the details. We’re having fun, John. Don’t spoil our fun.”

  “And don’t talk to me about returning favors,” says the man whose life Knox saved—twice.

  “Forty-seven thousand?”

  “I do not have the money, but I know where to find it. I can determine how it got there—that is the key. Getting it back . . . That is not of primary importance at the moment. First, we find it. We find it all.”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Dulwich says.

  But Knox is surprised. Flattered. Impressed. Guilt-ridden that they’ve taken the time to pursue his loss when it has nothing to do with Rutherford Risk.

  “Does Primer know?” Knox asks.

  “Hardly,” says Dulwich.

  “But you’re on his payroll. His clock.” He looks over at Grace. “His gear.”

  “Field testing the gear is critical,” she says.

  “There are more than eight hours in a day,” says Dulwich.

  The comment is laughable, though Knox doesn’t laugh. Dulwich lives his job—fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days. He doesn’t have time to tie his own shoes—he wears Top-Siders.

  “Thank you.” Knox wishes he’d saved some of the Scotch. He thinks about suggesting a trip to the hotel bar, drinks on him, but knows that’s absurd. The three of them can’t be seen together.

  “Thank us when you have her head on a stick,” Dulwich says.

  “And the funds back in your account,” Grace says, still rocking.

  She looks like a scared little girl. Knox considers reaching out to comfort her, but the timing is wrong; she’ll think it has to do with the money.

  The rug shop is on Kinkerstraat, sandwiched between a bra shop and an optiek, hardly a neighborhood for upscale rugs, but then again, looking around the narrow shop, Knox realizes the rugs are more Pottery Barn than Heriz.

  Gerhardt Kreiger is smoking in the back with the floor manager. Kreiger looks like a history professor in a tweed sport coat and black turtleneck. The manager needs to gain more than a few pounds. Knox searches the stock for anything of quality.

  “You’re wasting my time, Gerhardt.” Knox turns for the door.

  “Easy!” Kreiger has all the panache of a Buick salesman. “Not these! Wait, my friend.” Gerhardt hasn’t had a friend since 1978. He sidles up to Knox. “This is our gallery, nothing more. Patience, please.”

  It isn’t going the way Knox had hoped. He’d wanted a tour of the facility and says so. “As much as I appreciate you, Gerhardt, I’d hoped to talk directly with the seller.”

  “For obvious reasons, my friend, this is impossible.”

  Knox whispers, “For this much cash, nothing is impossible.”

  “You wanted samples. I have brought you samples. Third stack, rugs two through five.” He points, his fingertip yellowed by years of cigarettes.

  Gerhardt is being far too smart about this. Knox had hoped for incompetence.

  Knox peels back the top rug from the waist-high stack of rugs. It’s like looking at high-def television: an eye-popping clarity with wonderful dye-lot imperfections and gorgeous symmetry to the traditional design. Knox has run himself through a crash course and he’s shocked by the quality. He’d expected something passable; he’s looking at floor and wall art. He realizes Gerhardt had no idea of a price range when they’d spoken earlier. These have five to ten times the value Knox had expected.

  “Remarkable work,” he says, moving slowly back and forth among the five samples. />
  “It is,” says the store manager, trying to worm his way into the conversation. “Oushak, for the region in Turkey. Vegetable dye. Hand-knotted. Two hundred fifty thousand per square meter. Persian tea rug design.”

  The number swims around in Knox’s head. His jaw locks. He pictures Berna and her friends in leg irons circled around a rug tying all those knots. Each rug several meters. Enough rugs to fill a shipping container. It’s like looking at the Great Wall. It’s slavery at any wage.

  As he speaks his voice cracks. “Gorgeous. But are you sure it’s not Chinese?”

  The man approaches the stack. He ignites a cigarette lighter and places it close to the wool. If synthetic or plastic, the fibers melt quickly in a tiny puff of black smoke. Nothing happens. Natural fibers. He pockets the lighter and inspects the jute backing. “Turkish,” he declares.

  Knox and Gerhardt know otherwise—this is a product of the sweatshop. That it convinces the merchant of its Turkish origin is impressive.

  “I am sure you are right,” Knox says. He eyes Gerhardt, who arches his eyebrows declaratively. Knox thanks the merchant and moves to the door, Gerhardt alongside him like a dog heeling.

  “Nothing is impossible,” Knox repeats. “Call me when it’s arranged.”

  —

  THE MOMENT THE TEACHER’S EYES fall upon her, Maja knows the man—her “father”—is waiting at the classroom door. As the teacher heads to the door, Maja slides out of her desk chair like every bone has gone to jelly. On hands and knees, she gathers her books and looks to the window. The steel-framed half windows hinge at the top and open out. She steals across the room to the jeers of her seldom seen classmates and opens a window. It comes open only fifty centimeters, forcing her to throw a leg over the frame and wiggle to get through. When no one else comes to Maja’s aid, a girl finally jumps up and helps get her books out the window. This child then leaps back into her chair as the door opens and the teacher turns around.

  The visitor wears a heavy one-day beard. His face is florid and his eyes are glassy with rage. Many of the children stiffen, knowing such expressions well from home. Their teacher’s wide eyes and the sharp cry of Maja’s name are followed by her hurried approach to the window, from where she sees only the empty asphalt playground.