by Brian Selfon
But are his on now?
Zera is on Myrtle Avenue, about a quarter block from where it hits Stockholm Street. She has stopped walking. She taps and taps at her tracking phone, zooming in and out, adjusting the settings. At last she reaches the final point of precision. The red dot on the screen covers thirty feet in every direction from where she stands now. On the ground this is not a vast area. The flat ground, however, is not the only space Zera must reckon with. The red dot is not a circle, she was trained to remember, but a pillar, and extending up, in this instance, to the roofs of at least three four-story buildings. Dropping belowground into basements, sewers, cable lines, and gas tunnels. Thirty feet, in three dimensions, might as well be an ocean, and the lost tracking phone is not much bigger than a pair of credit cards, one stacked on top of the other.
Credit cards. Money.
“Money.” She’s remembering herself in the precinct training room, standing at the whiteboard. Talking to a couple dozen uniformed police officers, half of them asleep, about the Human Trafficking Task Force. “If we can catch the moneymen,” she told them, “they can take us to the monsters.”
And if we can get them, Zera feels rather than hears these last words, then maybe it wasn’t for nothing. Katja, Sveta … maybe the next girl will be okay. Maybe you can be, too.
Her phone buzzes, a call from her supervisor. He’ll want her back at the precinct, she knows, but she’s not ready to give up just yet. Her informant, her initiative, her responsibility. She silences her phone.
Eyes moving: the street, the sidewalk, the curb. A manhole, a McDonald’s cup, other loose cups, paper bags, plastic bags. A subway grate. A storm drain. Rubble and loose chunks of concrete at a collapsed stretch of the curb. The informant’s tracking phone can be anywhere. So she looks everywhere, picking, poking, digging. Using and wearing out three pairs of rubber gloves. And then the sky turns orange, and she at last accepts an unacceptable fact. The phone was here and now it isn’t. She takes off her gloves. Turns a slow circle.
Passersby, snippets of conversation, storefronts, placards, and advertisements—not English, not any of the half-dozen languages she picked up at the Paradise House—not human, it seems to her. She is a speck windblown toward the vanishing point. She is, unexpectedly, back at Golubovci airport.
She was nineteen years old (maybe), at last on her way out of Montenegro, and she was dazzled almost to the point of blindness. The candy racks, the cigarette packs, the neon lights outside the café and the duty-free shop, the harsh overhead lights of the airport itself. And then there was the noise from the intercom, and the gate-check staff shouting instructions at the passengers, the passengers shouting back—strangers yelling at strangers, families cursing among themselves.
“This must be so exciting for you!” The nonprofit that brought Zera to the United States had sent, to be her shepherd, an aggressively chipper young woman. Zera can no longer remember her name. She can, however, recall the specific feeling she had at that noisy airport. She did not feel saved. What she felt was annihilation. Away, at last, from the Paradise House, she was no one’s captive, no one’s warm body. Away, at last—she was no one at all. And for her this absence was, in its own surprising way, a threat, and it was unlike anything she’d faced in the Paradise House.
Now she stands on Myrtle Avenue near Stockholm Street. There’s a weight on her hip that represents her power to kill. There’s a badge pinned to her chest that announces her power to cage. And neither can alter a bitter truth. Through her whole life outside the Paradise House, she’s looked for a way to undo what had happened within it. Emil was her chance.
A train rumbles beneath her feet. The informant’s tracking phone could be down on those tracks, right next to his body.
She thinks back on how she managed Emil, and compares this with how the men at the Paradise House managed her. And this much she has to say for those well-dressed men: they’d never have let her get killed.
She was worth too much to them.
chapter 31
Kerry is nine years old, and she crawls down the Tower C fire escape. It’s Christmas Eve. It’s not a particularly cold winter, has hardly been Christmassy at all, but that afternoon it rained, and then the damp abruptly froze over. There’s an ice slick over the corrugated metal. Every step is unsteady, every inch a pop or a crunch. She moves slowly. Stops when she comes to laughter. On the other side of a frosted window, beyond the spider plant and succulents and cactus that line the windowsill, a family exchanges gifts. Two ties for the daddy. A small silver box for the mommy—Kerasha can’t make out what’s inside. And for the kids, the boxes are stacked high and deep, green ribbons for the older girl, red for the toddler. Hours pass. The family is gone. Shivering, Kerasha pries open the latch with a loose key she’d found a few days ago. She moves aside the spider plant and succulents and cactus and climbs inside. She goes straight to the gifts the girls left behind. Her hands shiver still as she takes the one that made her heart ache, a beautiful illustrated His Dark Materials boxed set. One touch and a warmth spreads through her hands and then all over her body. I see, she thinks, I want, I take, I have. And so on her ninth Christmas she attains something Mama never will, knowledge that life does not exist only to grind you down. It’s there to be taken.
And why am I remembering this now, she asks herself, why here? For that Christmas has bobbed up from deep memory at the residence of her psychiatrist. Which, by the way, she’s in the process of burglarizing.
The runner’s body is four days cold.
The six-story condo development on Parkside is new and understated, with tan bricks and tall windows. A doorman sits out front, a retired blue, Kerasha can tell. He has the girth, the drinker’s eyes, the narrow and truncated forehead. She catches all this on a walk-by. Sees a large coffee cup in front of him, another in the overstuffed trash can. He’ll have to pee, she thinks. She could just wait him out, there’s obviously no backup. But there’s a camera right outside the main entrance. She spots it on her second walk-by, positioned low and center, where the residents can see it. They’re who it’s there for, she realizes. The camera is the same as the potted ficus and the classic movie posters. It’s background. It’s comfort.
Still, a camera is a camera, and for Kerasha Brown, there are always better options.
At a bodega a few blocks away she buys a pack of cigarettes, though she doesn’t smoke, and a candy bar, not her brand. Better to leave false leads, Kerasha taught herself long ago, than none at all; the only safe blue is the one who thinks he’s onto something.
Alongside Dr. Xu’s apartment complex on its north side is a street lined with gleaming new streetlights. Skinny Kerasha would have shimmied up one of these. Waited for a lull in foot and street traffic, and then leapt from the crossbar to one of the second-floor balconies. Skinny Kerasha is not here tonight. Too tired for that Catwoman shit, Kerasha has hardly slept since Henry’s runner turned up dead. It’s a lazy, humid afternoon, and she feels old.
When did this happen to me?
A question Mama used to ask when she was on one of her comedowns.
Fuck. These are the worst moments in life. Worse than the arrest, worse than the two days she spent in solitary after the spork fight. She can hear the groans of her spirit friends Whitman and Saint Augustine, but fuck them, dead white assholes. The worst moments are recognition.
Having ruled out the north side of the apartment complex, Kerasha walks along a quiet residential block. Opposite the new apartment Dr. Xu lives in is old Brooklyn: two- and three-family housing, blue and yellow paint, stained and crumbling, probably bought a generation ago for fifty thousand and now each worth half a million. No purchase here for a patient spider; just witnesses. She moves on. At the corner two stroller moms catch up while their dogs, strapped to the carriages, snap at each other. The moms hating each other, Kerasha guesses, just as much. Passing them, she unsnaps the leashes.
Good luck, guys.
Amid the snarls and cri
es of the dogfight, Kerasha enters Dr. Xu’s complex through the service entrance. No camera here, of course. The door is already wedged open with a loose block of wood, and Kerasha finds herself steps behind two deliverymen hauling a couch. Both of them wearing back-support belts; both of them black, and she wonders if the three of them are the only ones in the building. Wonders why she bothered casing the front door when there was a colored entrance. Skinny Kerasha would have come straight here.
You’re rusty, girl.
Inside at last. The place is hers. She leaves a wrapper and a cigarette and hits the stairs.
On the floor outside room 8A is a bouquet of flowers in a glass vase stained purple. She picks it up, a perfect cover story should she run into someone: Who, sweet innocent me? I’m just the delivery girl.
She finds Dr. Xu’s apartment by following the stink of condescension. And by knowing the apartment number, which she got from a piece of personal mail she found in his office. The vase she sets outside a neighbor’s door, along with another wrapper and another cigarette.
Shake it, girl, skinny Kerasha says. Here’s the one place you can’t drag ass.
There are two locks, one of them a dead bolt, neither taking more than a minute to open. Inside, door closed, her heart races. Her fingertips tingle. What Mama felt, she supposes, the moment she pushed the plunger. A foretaste of the rush; delicious anticipation.
Easy, K. Skin warm, breath shallow, she realizes she’s become aroused. Desire? Huh. She wonders what she’ll do with it.
A chirp.
Really, Dr. Xu, a fucking alarm?
She glides across the dining room, the eight-seat table shimmering in the near dark. He polishes, she thinks. Of course he does.
Already her hands on it: the alarm is an NERS-F154, newer, prettier than the F150, but really the same toy she mastered when she was fourteen. She pulls down the front flap. Uses a safety pin to release the plastic panel. It wants to be deactivated, she thinks, all the NERS models are the same. Uses the safety pin again on the reset switch. The panel snaps back into place, ditto the front panel, and boom, the alarm is silent. Flashes green, reads ARMED AND READY! She gives the alarm a pat. Moves on.
The apartment is tasteful, modern, and bland. She is somehow both unsurprised and disappointed. These are the private quarters of Andrew Xu, distinguished doctor of mind rape. Where are the chains? The strange smells, the jarred fetuses—the child in the leather mask, chained to the oven—where the fuck is she?
The reality is Dr. Xu lives in an Ikea showroom. Lives amid birch and other cream-colored woods. Framed black-and-white photographs, mostly trains or train stations. And then she spots his bookshelves—flypaper to Kerasha. The top shelves are all paperback thrillers: with creased spines, these are the books he actually read. The next two shelves are pristine hardcovers, mostly nonfiction. The trophy-wife books, she thinks, what you buy to be seen with. The bottom shelves, about knee- and then ankle-high, are big volumes, art books that someone, she decides, regifted to him. Textbooks from med school, must be twenty years out of date. But also on this shelf is a slender volume she immediately recognizes, An Unquiet Mind. She stole this same book from Human Relations on Flushing Avenue just days ago. Unsettled, she moves to the bathroom.
Above the sink is a mounted toothbrush holder, identical to the one in the upstairs bathroom of her uncle’s house. The lonesome toothbrush here is unexpectedly affecting. Even she, a spider defined by her solitude, has someone to share a bathroom with. A life for Dr. Xu comes into view. Quiet mornings, blue nights. Alone, except at his office. Alone, except when a patient sits across from him, sharing pain over a bowl of marbles.
Kerasha is uneasy and confused. This isn’t why she came here. But now into his medicine cabinet.
Nail clippers. Sleeping pills and multivitamins. Baking soda toothpaste. Shaving cream for sensitive skin, contact lens solution for sensitive eyes. Every loose object she rotates 180 degrees. He will come home to this, his privacy fingered. What he’s tried with her, she’s doing to him.
In the kitchen walk-in pantry she finds cases of wine stacked four high. Still sealed, she notices. Dusty. Printed labels on the water-stained cardboard: MERLOT OF THE MONTH CLUB. The labels are addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Andrew Xu.
Unhappy girl, Kerasha thinks, but at least you got away. Thank your stars, Mrs. No Longer Xu. There’s no court order dragging you back.
Again unease, again confusion. This is not what she came for, but already her hands are at work, opening drawers. Turning forks upside down, swapping teaspoons and tablespoons. She loosens the paper towel roll and rigs it to fall when he touches it. Then she moves to the bedroom.
On the nightstand is another book, Jhumpa Lahiri, and she hates that Dr. Xu has turned out to be a genuine reader. She moves his bookmark back several pages. Petty, she knows, but there’s an exquisite frisson just the same—the tiny shiver moves all the way through her.
Outside, curbside, she wonders what happened, why it feels like she was the one who got dirtied. Wonders, also, why she didn’t go further. She could go back and unscrew a lightbulb. Breathe on his mirror. Trace the seams of his pillow with her fingertips, with her lips.
But she won’t go back, she promises herself. And she won’t ever visit when he’s inside.
part seven
the snitch in effigy
chapter 32
There’s no good seating at Catania Bakery on Harman Street, so Henry and Starr take their pastry bag curbside. Starr opens the bag, gets to work, and speaks through mouthfuls of food.
“Everything’s awful,” Starr says, her face flushed. “I can’t even describe…” But she does describe, in great detail, the expensive dying of her cat Banana. The lump on her neck, the credit card Starr used to cover the bill. The new lump found on her “belly-welly,” her fur getting oily. Banana too sick to lick herself clean.
Henry finds this more than a little disgusting. He puts down his coffee.
“So then Dr. Hirsh is like, ‘We have to think about what’s best for Banana.’ And I’m like, What the hell does that mean? But I know.”
Henry nods. Banana is important to Starr, Starr is important to him, so this is just one of those moments when he has to nod and say he’s sorry.
“But it’s worse,” she says. “So finally, I’m like, okay. I’ll do it.” Starr blows her nose into her napkin. “And then it’s over, and I’m like a wreck. And I’m on my way out of the clinic, and the witch at the front desk”—another nose blow—“she’s like, excuse me, Ms. Richardson? And I thought she was going to say how sorry she was, and I was already opening up my arms to take a hug. Because I needed it. But she gives me a bill!”
And so Henry learns that the cost of feline euthanasia, at least at Camp Happy Paws, is eighty-five dollars. “That’s awful,” he says. He waits a respectful moment and then says, “Your text said something about—”
“So I call my sister,” Starr says, having blown her nose over Henry’s question. “And she’s a total bitch. And I ask for some money, and she’s like, ‘Wait, you paid? You could’ve gotten money for this. Fucking post it on Craigslist. Somebody would pay to kill a cat.’”
Henry slides closer to Starr. He rubs her back, waiting for her to stop crying. Noting, now that he’s close to her, that she is wearing a black bra under her white shirt. His body tells him this is a very good combination for her. His body asks him if, under different circumstances, he might want to complicate their friendship. He tells his body to shut the fuck up. She’s in pain, stupid. Just be there for her.
His phone buzzes. His hand goes for it, but he fights the impulse. Allows his friend to have her cry. Sometime later, Starr is coming back to herself again, and she manages a sly smile. “So you know how you asked me to look out for a woman with weird hands?”
Henry sits up straight. “You found her?”
“She kind of fell into my lap.” She takes out her phone. “So the on-duty sergeant sends me out on a doughnut run. And
I get the doughnuts, and I’m heading to the conference room. And on my way, I pass this office. And boom—she’s in there.”
“This is for real?”
“Check it out.” She holds up her phone for Henry. On-screen: a voice recorder app.
“You didn’t.”
“I totally did! Listen.”
Henry tries.
But apparently the phone mic is a joke, and the noise from Harman Street is a motherfucker. So they go back into Catania Bakery, go past the counters, the ovens, and a baker who gives Henry a thumbs-up. Now he and Starr are alone together in the bathroom. Door closed, knob lock engaged—black bra, white shirt—but here’s Starr, handing over the phone. Then her smile breaks open—she’s obviously proud of herself—and she reaches over and taps the phone.
Silence.
“Shoot,” Starr says. “I think I … I thought…”
“It’s okay,” Henry says. He would forgive much more, being this close to her, and his heart is racing and sinking at the same time. “What did you hear?”
Starr grumbles at her phone as she puts it back into her pocket. “Not a lot, but the cop with the hands is Officer Montenegro. I looked her up—she’s a field intelligence officer cross-designated to work in the Human Trafficking Task Force.”
“English, please.”
“She reads all the reports that come through the precinct. She’s supposed to spot trends and make connections.”
Montenegro—Henry kicks the name around in his head. Nada. “She wasn’t on Emil’s incident report.”
“I know, I double-checked that too,” Starr says, taking out her phone again just to scowl at it.