The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  HE RETURNED AT last, the articulate one with his silent companions. Forearm to her face, Munroe shielded her eyes from the light that shadowed the men in silhouette. The English speaker put a packet on the floor. Used his foot to slide the bundle toward her.

  “Clean clothes,” he said. “Put them on. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” He glanced at the tray. “The food?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He shook his head. “There are no drugs.”

  “All the same,” she said, leaning forward to reach for the package.

  His response to her movement—their responses—gave her pause.

  They stood there, three against one, blocking the exit to a prison cell built for miniature people, and twitched when she’d shifted toward them.

  “Can you turn it off?” Munroe said, nodding her head toward the strongest source of sound.

  “It’s not possible,” he said, and she knew then that whoever this young man was, and whatever role he played in what happened to her, he wasn’t the final authority. “I apologize for this treatment,” he said with a cursory wave toward the mattress, the walls. “We’d been told you might not come willingly and felt it best to take precautions. You understand, I think.”

  She didn’t reply, just stood, and in a space small enough that she could have simply reached out and taken the package, stepped forward. Microsecond gaps of instinct measured their body language, reported back with clarity and understanding: They’d come three against one into this cell because all three were unarmed—brute force in place of weapons.

  The articulate one watched her with curious eyes, as if like the others he knew she had the potential to be dangerous, but like a child waiting for the snake to strike just to see what happened, he doubted.

  “Won’t you open it,” he said, eager, she supposed, for her reaction to the clothing in the package. She slipped her finger into a crease and tore the paper.

  Inside were men’s clothes. Pants. Shirt. Shoes. Undergarments. Elastic bandage. The hair on the back of her neck raised slightly. These people, whoever they were, knew far more about her than was comfortable.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the young one said. He nodded toward the larger of the two flanking him, a man with scars and disfigurement that spoke of fighting that had been close and personal. “Then Arben will cut your hair.”

  Munroe returned to the mattress. Placed the wrapping and the clothes beside her and, with hands relaxed on her thighs, looked up at the young one. Said, “If he touches me, I’ll kill him.”

  Rattle on a snake, a dog’s growl to prevent a bite, her warning was meant to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and the burden of taking life, because as surely as the earth turned, if that man put a hand on her, instinct and history would overwhelm reason and she would destroy him or die trying.

  The young man choked back a cough and followed it with a snicker.

  Arben and the nameless third showed no reaction; the guards spoke no English.

  Fingering the collar of the new shirt, her eyes deliberately avoiding the English speaker, Munroe said, “Get me clippers. I’ll cut my own hair.”

  “I will consider it,” he said.

  THEY LEFT HER to change, although she needed a shower: hot to the point of scalding, to rid herself of her own smell, the sick of this place, and the remnants of the cotton-headed fog of whatever they’d used to put her under. But there was no water. Only the mattress, the cold concrete floor, and the drain in the corner that she’d noticed once the hallway light had filtered in.

  She stripped down and put the new clothing on.

  Their charade, their rules. For now.

  Slipped back into the leather jacket and zipped it closed.

  The men came again, fifteen minutes as promised, although she had only an internal clock to gauge the truthfulness of time. They waited for her at the cell opening; didn’t approach, didn’t attempt to cuff or touch her, nor did they move to force her to rise when she remained seated on the filthy mattress staring blankly at them. Curiosity dared her to test their resolve, to see how hard she could push before they reacted, but the desire to escape this dank hellhole was stronger.

  She rose to follow.

  In the doorway, the English speaker stared at her jacket as if demanding she remove it, as she had the rest of her clothes. She shook her head, a slow no. The man-boy paused and, in an act of maturity that belied his youth or ego, half grinned. “We take care of the hair later,” he said, and stepped out of her way.

  Munroe ducked through the opening. Squeezed by him into the narrow corridor, where fluorescent bulbs, crudely daisy-chained along the ceiling, made the hallway institutionally bright. The sting of bleach smarted in her nose, masking more of the moldy wet damp that had filled the cell.

  The sight, the scent, hit her with the full impact of a brick to the head: memories of violence and retribution still fresh from Argentina. And although the events that had previously drawn her into the arms of evil had been random, because of them she knew what this place was and what being here might mean, and for the first time since she’d been awake—for the first time in a very long time—bloodlust, immediate and feral, burned up from inside and crept toward her fingertips.

  Munroe clenched her hands and glanced down the hall.

  To the right stretched the length of two more cells, and near the end, drowning out the Hungarian, came another scream, carrying with it not pain but all the primal vibration of animal rage.

  Munroe turned in the direction of the cry. Flanked fully in the narrow hall, two in front and one behind, she would have had to move through the men to get anywhere. They paused because she paused, did not touch her, and offered no explanation. After a long wordless standoff, the young one finally motioned her to the left, in the opposite direction of the screams.

  She followed down a seeming dead end that cornered to face steep stairs beckoning with fresh air and natural light. A thick metal door separated the world below from the living above, an otherwise impenetrable barrier, that at the moment stood open and inviting. Still flanked and guarded, Munroe stepped through to a high-ceilinged room, where light from transom-style windows bathed her and the workers’ whispers flowed around her in a mixture of words; some Slavic—not identical to the Macedonian she already spoke, but familiar—others the language of the silent ones, a language she hadn’t heard in years. In response to the multiple conversations, as naturally as breathing, intrusive and invasive, without work, without effort, flashes of illumination set off inside her brain.

  They walked the corridor of the stone-floored room, a path formed between smaller offices off to one side and the oddly spaced desks and cluttered tabletops that filled the open-spaced area. Munroe’s eyes roamed from ceiling beams to floor, from wall to wall, searching out routes of escape, scanning for improvisable weapons.

  Employees were busy over mounted magnifying lenses and small Bunsen burners, wax molds and scalpels: gold-crafting in all its stages. No one paused when they passed, and in the apparent nonchalance Munroe sensed a mixture of fear and commonplace experience, as if a dirty prisoner of war being marched along a goldsmith’s workstation was a normal course of events in this place.

  The scene, surreal as it was, ended as quickly as it had begun.

  The scarred man whom the articulate one had called Arben and his still nameless partner took up sentry positions outside a door; he opened it and nodded her inside. She paused. The young English speaker continued past her without a backward glance. Munroe stepped into the room, the door shut behind her, and she stopped.

  Filling the room, floor to ceiling, on shelves along each wall, in glass cases, resting on chairs, and standing on credenzas, were porcelain dolls: small and life-size, hand-painted and air-brushed, richly clothed with waxen hair, curled and styled. They stared out at her—more lifeless eyes than she could count—each doll in perfect condition: items a collector had doted on and cared for, with not a speck of dust to tarnish them.

&n
bsp; The rest of the office resembled any other random business, although from the fixtures, the window, and the radiator beneath it, she was clearly not in Texas—or the United States for that matter. Europe. She suspected the Balkans based on the languages she’d heard in the big room and the old stone architecture and the impression of a courtyard beyond the window—beyond the man who partially blocked her view.

  He sat behind the desk, hands folded upon it, head haloed by the morning light that left his face in shadow. Munroe nodded an acknowledgment. He nodded back, and if she guessed correctly, he was smiling.

  He stood and reached for the vertical blinds. Tilted and pulled them across the window so that Munroe no longer squinted at his shadow and in English without any trace of the young one’s accent invited her to sit. His smile was genial, his manner gracious, and while Munroe tipped her head again, matching geniality for geniality, the primal side of her brain calculated the odds of the window frame having been reinforced, the glass replaced with shatter-proof, the difficulty with which she might plunge into him and take them both out the window to the cobblestones below.

  He followed her eyes as they wandered from the dolls to the window and back again and, as if reading her reaction upside-down, said, “They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

  Munroe offered a half-smile in answer.

  The Doll Man stood and walked to the shelf on her left; starting near the window, with hands behind his back like a general surveying troops on parade, he worked his way along the wall, pausing to admire and occasionally reach out and touch a lock of hair or rearrange a dress.

  He was five-foot-six at the most, and small, not just in height. Had he been a woman, petite would have been a better description. He was immaculately clothed in a suit, surely custom made, his tie perfectly knotted, his shoes at a high shine. Thinning hair and hands with ample sun spots put him in the upper range of sixty-plus, though from his posture and controlled energy, it would be a mistake to think of him as aging.

  “Perfection,” he said, his fingers to lace, his voice soft and full of admiration. “They have no flaws, only beauty.” He paused and, still gazing at the dolls, whispered, “Only beauty.”

  The man turned toward Munroe and his voice returned to room volume. “I have others,” he said, “but these are my treasures. I keep them close; they bring me joy.” He stopped to stroke a porcelain cheek and then with a sigh walked back to the desk and returned to his chair.

  “But I am rude,” he said. “And you have questions.”

  Munroe waited a beat, allowed silence to engulf the room while she studied him and he studied her. “Where am I?” she said finally. “And why am I here?”

  “You are in Croatia for an assignment,” he said, and punctuated the statement with a dismissive wave. He shifted and crossed his legs. “To repay the debt.”

  Munroe held back a snort. It would be reasonable to ask for clarification in order to understand this obligation of which he spoke so casually, as though he took for granted that she was familiar with the matter, but instinct told her to hold back. “Most people simply request my help,” she said. “No matter what it is you want, kidnapping me, putting me in a cell, and keeping me under guard is the worst kind of way to get it.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Most people would ask, I suppose. But I expect this job falls beyond what you consider acceptable. Why bother with the opportunity for you to say no? That would only make me angry.”

  Munroe kept quiet while thought unspooled in an attempt to apply logic to madness. Her inner danger reading snapped like a Geiger counter to radiation, warning her not to press, prompting her to play his game. She leaned forward, matching him posture for posture. Folded her hands on the desk and said, “What can I do for you?”

  The Doll Man shifted back and smiled as if he were breathing the victory of the moment, making a memory of a battle won before it had started, even though he’d known he would. His smile told of power and control in a world where he ruled supreme, a sadistic smile Munroe had seen before, that declared he owned her, and what lay beneath that smile ticked up the tempo of her heartbeat.

  Motionless, expressionless, she waited until he finally leaned forward and spoke again. “You will deliver a package,” he said. “Transport from point A to point Z, so to speak.”

  The words were no surprise—not given the underground from which she’d just come. “Is the package alive?”

  “Yes, very much alive,” he replied, eyes lit and dancing as if he’d finally found a worthy playmate.

  Munroe leaned back, slow, casual, deliberate. She studied his face, waited for cues, then continued on. “Transport a live package,” she said. “I could probably do that, although it would depend on the package and the location. I assume that since no isn’t an acceptable answer, I’m also not getting paid?”

  The man’s expression clouded. The brilliant playmate had turned into an idiot after all. “You repay the debt,” he said. “That should be more than enough.”

  “What if I disagree? And what if, after all your trouble, I still say no?”

  “I have ways to insist.”

  “I have ways to decline.”

  “You’ll pay one way or the other,” he said.

  “In euros? Dollars? How much do I owe you?”

  If he registered the sarcasm, he didn’t react to it. “You pay in the only currency that holds value to you,” he said. “You pay in innocent life.”

  The words stung like a hard smack across the face and her eyes smarted as if she’d been physically struck. He should not know these things.

  Casual indifference remained plastered on her face while deep below, in that hollow crevice where madness had lain dormant these last nine months, the slow, steady percussion of war tapped out, faint but perceptible.

  “Which innocents?” she said.

  He waved his hand with that dismissive gesture. “Innocents are innocents,” he said. “Is one life really valued higher than another?”

  From the fear bubbling to the surface, she instinctively knew. Knew that the only way a man in his position could gloat as if he owned her was if he held what she deemed most priceless. She said, “Millions of innocents die every year, nobody can save them all.”

  “Then allow me to show you.”

  He reached for the phone and pressed the intercom button, and when the speaker came alive with a voice, he spoke in a language he assumed she didn’t understand summoning the person who’d answered. In the resulting wait, the Doll Man leaned back, hands folded in his lap, observing her with his sly smile.

  Munroe studied her nails while the inner anvil pounded plowshares back into swords, and with deep and measured breaths she braced for what was to come.

  When the office door opened, Munroe didn’t turn. Her focus remained on the Doll Man, whose expression shifted with a fleeting glimpse of pleasure that passed as quickly as it had arrived.

  “You’ve met Valon,” the Doll Man said, though he wasn’t looking at Munroe. The newcomer was the English speaker from the dungeon, the one important enough that he’d needed bodyguards, the one still more boy than man. Valon Lumani greeted his elder with reverence, then turned to glance at Munroe, studied her until the Doll Man arrested his attention.

  Their exchange was in Albanian, and elation threatened to creep out from under Lumani’s skin as he basked in the sparse words of commendation offered by the old man. And then the Doll Man’s tone changed. “Show her,” he said, and Lumani responded by pulling a phone from his pocket. He thumbed the controls and with video playing and volume turned up, put it in front of Munroe.

  Her body screamed in rebellion. Her lungs seized, the percussion beat harder, faster, while Logan, battered and bloody, refused to speak when ordered, refused to cry out when struck. The world turned a hazy black and white that blocked out everything but the man behind the desk.

  The anvil hammered out the order to kill.

  Blinded, unable to focus, Munroe pushed the tumult into
silence, forced herself to watch the clip, to truly grasp beyond Logan to his surroundings—searching out clues to his location and finding them in split seconds of shaky footage that encompassed a table and window in the background.

  A Ziploc bag and two-inch horizontal wooden blinds. Mainstays of American culture, available elsewhere but not with the convenience and price of the United States—certainly not in Europe.

  In a house or an office somewhere in the U.S., Logan took another hit. More blood, more broken cartilage. A gun to the back of his head. Munroe gave no outward reaction. Inside, the pressure struggled to break free, to pull her out of the chair and over the desk, to wrap her hands around the Doll Man’s neck until his face changed color and his tongue lolled lifeless, and she stole from him his final breath the way he was stealing hers.

  Lumani turned off the clip and tucked the phone away.

  Munroe let air seep into her lungs in measured portions, afraid to breathe, afraid to betray the pain and fear that burned through her veins; guarded against showing the rage and hatred she felt toward this man and his protégé.

  Debt.

  Package.

  Transport.

  To kill the Doll Man now would pull the trigger of the gun at Logan’s head. She was too far away to save him from the repercussions before they exploded outward. Her mind reeled, searching for answers, searching for a way out. Munroe pointed toward the pocket in which Lumani had stashed the phone, turned to the man behind the desk, and said, “So I deliver your package, and you pay me by returning the life of that guy?”

  A half-beat of disappointment registered on the Doll Man’s face before the sly smile returned and he said, “Yes, you will have repaid the debt, and I will exchange it by returning that life.”

  Which was bullshit, of course.

  There was no way a man with the power to find her, kidnap her, and transport her across the ocean, a man who had a dungeon hollowed out below his building, would allow her to see his face, this hideaway, one of his businesses, if he intended to let her—much less Logan—walk free. But the illusion of his control, and the appearance that she accepted the lie, was all that mattered. She tipped her head in silent acknowledgment.