Hillman pulled something out of the box. My heart stopped or I stopped breathing, had to remember how again.
The salamander. A burnt umber color, with two wide yellow stripes down the back. Startling. Iridescent, almost bright gold. Tiny smooth bumps to the skin. Posed in a sinuous way, like a living river. Flat. Wide. Maybe as long as the box. But the small eyes and mouth gave the creature a vulnerable quality.
The salamander almost seemed to smile. Reassuring me.
Then Hillman set it on fire. I’d been so focused on the salamander, I hadn’t seen him take out the lighter.
“No!” I screamed, and I must’ve lunged at Hillman, because one of the other two kicked me and I fell over again, doubled over in pain and frustration.
Hillman dropped the salamander into a large metal wastebasket … and watched it burn.
“So now there’s nothing to investigate anyway, right?”
The salamander began to turn black, and a stench rose from it. One of them slid the balcony doors open to let in fresh air.
While I was bereaved, aghast, watching the face of the answer that had eluded me begin to melt, taking the smile with it. Watching my past melt away.
One of the other men had brought a laptop over, and Hillman retreated from the stool so the laptop could rest there.
Following that motion, I realized someone else was tied to another chair, just beyond my peripheral vision. Someone quiet. The positioning seemed purposeful. What I wasn’t meant to see.
“Who’s that? Who’s that?” Afraid it was my husband. Afraid because it could be anyone.
But Hillman ignored me, and I heard the sound of one of the others moving the other chair until it was all the way behind me. Whoever it wasn’t couldn’t or wouldn’t say anything.
“We’re going to prop you up so you can talk to someone. If you give us any trouble, that man over there is going to shoot you with your own gun.”
“It’s not my gun. Who else is here? In the chair.”
“Okay? Do you understand me? About shooting you?”
I grew still. Hillman looked like he was about to hit me.
“Okay.”
With difficulty, I got into a sitting position despite the thicket of exploded lawn chair around me. Pieces cut into my arms while others dangled from weird angles.
The laptop was set on the stool, and I could see a face in motion across the screen. A familiar face.
Older than his photographs. White hair and a white beard. Hollowed out at the cheekbones so the eyes shone with an almost messianic glint. Who could mistake him for any other soul? The senior Vilcapampa, Silvina’s father. The head of legions from hell. Maker of money across the globe, at whatever price. Beloved philanthropist.
“Jane,” he said, smiling, his voice hollowed out, too. A smoker’s voice. Those cigars.
But he didn’t just say “Jane.” No, Mr. Vilcapampa used my full legal name. Drawn out. The hollowness became gravel, then faded again. I couldn’t tell if it was the connection or just his voice. I was too in awe of him. Not in the sense of worship or adulation. But in the sense of a mythical beast appearing before me so unexpectedly.
“This is illegal. This is kidnapping,” I said. “Who else is in the room? Who’s behind me?”
Like a stupid parrot. The kick in the side had dislodged more pieces of the chair. I still couldn’t get free, but maybe if they kicked me some more …
Vilcapampa shrugged, ignored my question. “Perhaps. Was it legal when you broke into this apartment?” I was sick of hearing about that. “Anyway, it matters not.” It matters not. Just the way he spoke. “You’re an intelligent woman with a high-powered career. Why do you think I want to talk to you? Why should I take the time?”
Like this was a job interview or he was with HR and I was about to receive a reprimand.
“I don’t know. I don’t care.” Which was true, in a way. He was like a cliff or a surging sea. A projection of masks. A force that had worn on Silvina like a geological event. The stench of the salamander scorched my nostrils. I hated him.
“Fair enough. As you say.” His features became stern, turned that way sudden, but also in a rearrangement so swift it felt like acting. “I am a busy man, so I’ll keep this brief. Silvina was a terrorist and a bad seed and a blight on our family’s legacy. I have spent too much time cleaning up after her and defending the family name. I will not have scandal, now that she is dead.”
“She tasked me with—”
“With nothing.” The weight he put on the word hurt my shoulder.
“She wanted to make the world a better place,” I said.
“No. She wanted to destroy the world.”
“Silvina gave me that hummingbird for a reason.”
Vilcapampa shook his head. “No. She gave you the hummingbird because she was unwell, deranged.”
“Did you kill her?”
Vilcapampa’s face went terrifyingly blank, as if someone had turned him off.
“No,” he said finally, as if there was a time delay. “She made her own trouble, who she talked to, who she did business with. She was … She was … like a diplomat who wants peace but winds up running guns. No better than Langer.”
I didn’t want to hear that. I told myself it didn’t make sense, that Vilcapampa was lying.
“You did business with Langer. Your people. And you took the hummingbird,” I said.
He shrugged, but his gaze had moved offscreen, as if asking a question of someone I couldn’t see. Another person I couldn’t see.
“What we want to know is what you know. About Silvina’s final project. What she told you.”
“She told me nothing.”
“You must know something. You’re an analyst. You’ve studied the evidence, begun an investigation. You’ve followed the clues.”
“No. I’ve been chasing shadows.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’re the one who made sure no one wrote about her death. You’re the one who disowned her, gave her nowhere else to turn but criminals.”
Even through the haze, I felt the sting of desperation. It was the desperation of knowing I’d never have a chance to talk to Vilcapampa again—and wanting to know so much more. I don’t think the threats had even registered. But that was likely the painkillers.
“We could pay you well,” Vilcapampa said. “To give us the information.”
Maybe, if not for the painkillers, the situation, how far I’d come … Maybe I would’ve answered differently. Found some way to answer differently.
“I have nothing to give you.”
Vilcapampa opened his mouth to reply, closed it again. Then began again.
“I thought you might understand the severity of this—and do the right thing. But, I can see that you don’t.”
“The world is so cracked open,” I said. “The world is broken. She wanted to fix it.” It was all I had. Yes, I was drunk, in a sense. I was not myself. But I meant it, and there it was laid bare: the reason behind the reasons, that meant I still had hope.
“That warehouse was Silvina’s. The animals in it were what she sold to bankroll her crimes. First she stole them, then she sold them. Or tried to. Do you understand?”
I had no answer. The pain was becoming less under ice and more the coals. All I could say, again, was, “Who else have you kidnapped? Who is sitting behind me?”
Vilcapampa drew closer to the screen. I could see the fissures around his eyes. I could see that he wore foundation and concealer for age spots. I could see the ferocity of his gaze and the certainty of it. Almost too much ferocity.
“I thought I owed you a meeting and a reasonable conversation. For who Silvina was, before. But I was wrong. Now it’s time for a different approach. For the old-fashioned, time-honored ways. Good-bye.”
He nodded to Hillman, who snapped the laptop shut.
That was all I would ever see of Vilcapampa. In this life or the next.
“Are you going to let me go n
ow? You can drop me off at—”
Another kick in the ribs and a matter-of-fact look. Just the usual from Hillman.
“Tough luck, but we have to find out everything you know. By whatever means. Doesn’t trust you any more than he trusted Silvina. It’s not up to me if you’re alive at the end—it’s up to you.”
“Did he kill Silvina?”
“You mean, did I kill Silvina? No.”
Hillman sounded insulted. Like I’d said something absurd, and I believed his answer. Even with an undertone I didn’t understand.
He nodded to the two men and they went into the other room to get something. I heard one drop something heavy, metallic, and curse. A sinking feeling to match the ache in my head and my side. I thought I knew why Vilcapampa had risked talking to me direct. Because I wasn’t getting out of here. No matter what I gave up.
“Nothing personal,” Hillman said. “Really, I mean that.”
“It’s all personal,” I said.
Hillman nodded slow, lips pursed, like I’d said something profound.
“Why not just let me die in the fire? You’re about to find out I don’t know anything.”
Hillman ignored me. “We already moved your car, wiped what we could. No one will know you were there. Or us. It’s all on Langer. And maybe you tell us what you know, you get your life back. Or, your choice, you flat-out disappear like Langer got to you. Like you took on Langer because you feared rendition.”
“Retribution.”
“What did I say?”
“Rendition.”
“Is that important?”
“Clarity. About who you are.” Which I had none of. Clarity. I was just saying things through a mist that swept through like needles.
Hillman shrugged again. “Here’s one answer, but you won’t like it.”
Grunting, he turned my messed-up chair around until I was face-to-face with a bloody mask of a face, the body beneath it slouched in a torn dress shirt and black trousers. He had no shoes, just black socks.
It took a moment. But then I recognized him.
Alex. They’d interrogated Alex. He was breathing. I could tell because of the blood bubbles popping around his mouth. But I didn’t think he’d ever be able to see out of his left eye again.
“A kind of premonition, you think? A kind of prequel, you think?” Hillman said.
A kind of bloody sack of meat. Who’d known nothing.
Hillman opened his mouth to add something. But I never found out what he would’ve said next.
Because I’d sprung to my feet and bull-rushed him.
Maybe if I’d made a move for the door, he would’ve been ready. But I didn’t. So I plowed him under. Something snapped inside of Hillman and he screamed and his leg collapsed under him. And his collapse knocked Alex over.
Just as the goons came back into the room, struggling with a plastic tarp. One had had to put his gun down. The other had no clear line of sight.
By then I was lunging through the screen door to the balcony, breaking the mesh out of its frame.
I didn’t think. I hurled myself over the balcony, as another fucking mosquito of a bullet clipped me in the left arm. I went over the side snarling like an animal, feeling all my weight in the fall and trying in that split second to protect my vulnerable spots, hands still tied, entangled in pieces of chair, but most of it mercifully left behind at the balcony door.
Just a wrestling move. Just a dive and roll. Choreograph it in your head as you tumble. Something I’d practiced a hundred times.
The fall took forever. The fall took no time at all.
Did I care if I died this way?
I was going to die another way, if not.
Screaming from the heat of the smoldering salamander clenched in my hands.
But I would not let go.
[67]
My brother’s name was Ned. Yes, let’s call him “Ned.” We lived in the wildest part of, say, Oregon. That’s where the farm was: out in the boonies. The place that eventually gets broadband and chain stores and isn’t much different from the rest of the world. But people who don’t live there don’t understand that.
Ned was the earnest, open type, with a strong jaw and a shock of thick brown hair and striking blue eyes. He’d tried wrestling, too, but sports couldn’t much hold his attention. He wasn’t built that way. On top of all the rest, no matter how Shot tried to cure him of it, Ned was thoughtful, introspective. He considered things before he spoke and he didn’t waste words, and you could already see in him, as a teenager, the man he would’ve become. Because he was that man even at fourteen. I wondered sometimes if my mother had had an affair.
To watch the girls in town look at him as he walked by … this was something I’d never have from the boys, and yet I didn’t begrudge Ned. For one thing, he didn’t even know he was beautiful. No, the only thing I begrudged Ned was a kind of secretiveness that came with the introspection, built in. He kept things to himself.
But even then, in the last years, as the divide increased between us, because of our age, because I wasn’t a boy, our expeditions kept us close. That and surviving Shot. Or “Shit,” as we also called him.
Ned’s fascination with things under rocks as a child only intensified and sharpened as a teen. He could have a kind of lazy aspect because he didn’t act right away, but things under rocks brought out a laser-like attention. It coalesced around more than just salamanders. But I noticed the salamanders more because he had to work for them harder and harder. They became a rare treasure around the farm as creeks dried up, or maybe it was the herbicides and pesticides to protect the crops. Or maybe the new development by rich folks up in the heights, and the runoff from that. But in the little hidden ravines where creeks ran at the bottom … we still would find them.
This could be Sundays with the forest beyond the farm as our church. Or we’d finished our chores after school and Shot was off at a bar getting drunk. We had to do things we liked while Shot was getting drunk, to store up kindliness, laughter, nice memories, as a kind of barricade.
Ned had learned of the megafauna of the Trinity Alps of California, and even though that was far distant from the farm, he hoped for some local sighting.
“Those places we can’t get to—the gorge, maybe.”
The gorge bordered an abandoned quarry, so I didn’t think so. But I never said that.
Ten feet long, the Trinity Alps Giant Salamander had first been reported in the 1920s by a trapper. Basking in the headwaters of a remote river. Brown-black, strong, and broad. Never caught. Not a single photograph, even with sightings through the 1970s. But Ned fixated on the expeditions of Captain Hubbard in the 1950s. Which found nothing. Except the vast, unconquered wilderness that exists there today.
I knew why Ned clung to these mysteries. It was the same reason I lost myself in a stack of old Nancy Drew novels, and, when those ran out, the Hardy Boys. Then you didn’t have to think about where you were or sullen, terrible dinners with your mother half-insane and your father absent enough that Shot could do whatever he wanted. Verbal abuse. Being slapped around. Pushed into walls. Punched in the gut. It was easier to ignore when I got into wrestling just because I didn’t have to explain the injuries anymore.
Except, later, I understood Ned better—after he was gone. It wasn’t just escape, all those mysterious details, that amazing mythical salamander. By telling me the giant salamander could be near where we lived, he was changing the landscape around me. He was changing what we dreaded, and what stifled him, into something exciting and positive and new. Getting rid of the residue of Shot that contaminated everything.
It took me a long time to see it that way. But when I did, years later, I remember I sat down on a bench in a park and wept. From the weight of it and the goodness. The sweetness of it. The pureness.
But I was younger, and Ned must have felt that responsibility. So as Shot got worse and Dad even less present, the fantasy of the salamander that overtook Ned meant leaving me behind
for some of it. Daytime expeditions to the usual places were fine. But suddenly one summer, when I’d been looking forward, without school, to more escapes, not fewer … a wall came up.
“There are places in the wilderness too dangerous for you,” he’d say.
“There are places only someone stronger can get to,” he’d say.
I was big for my age but not strong yet. Perhaps that stung. Or I thought he was saying I was clumsy. Perhaps that stung. But not for long. That was the thing about Ned, if he’d ever become evil. He could say just about anything and you’d forgive him.
“There are places.” Places I couldn’t go without him. It wasn’t like the law didn’t exist where we lived, but there were gaps.
So we’d have our time, two or three times a week. The well-worn grooves of familiar bogs and ponds and creeks. But then he’d bring me back to the farm and go out again. I remember the narrow space around the side of the barn very well, covered over by trees, intruded on by bushes. Because that’s how we’d sneak back onto the property if we thought Shit was around.
“He’s going to do what he’s going to do,” Ned said. “You have to live your life, when he’s not, like you mean to.”
Even in punishment, caught, I saw a kind of light in Ned’s eyes, some lightness to his features that felt like a secret smile. No slumped shoulders. He would look Shot straight in the eye, and, at first, that made Shot worse, but eventually Shot began to look away. As if Ned was showing him something about Shot’s future he didn’t like much.
Except there was cause and effect. I didn’t want to “get shit from Shot” because the more Ned’s stare got to Shot, the more he took it out on me. And I had no way to tell Ned that. Not in a way that didn’t feel selfish or wrong.
The times Shot would smack me when I was doing chores in the barn. The time he finally figured out my “secret” route and popped out of the bushes in that narrow space coming back from a salamander search and crushed me against the barn wall and punched me in the kidneys and then was off again, manic this time, thankfully. If he’d been morose, he would’ve spent more time on me. Me, on the ground, staring up at the tree branches, thinking how beautiful it all looked. It was spring. Everything was green. My belly hurt so much I thought something had ripped open inside.
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