After a moment, he said, “Lyda, are you using again?”
“What? What the fuck, Rovil. No. That’s in the past.”
“I want to help you. I do. But if you’re spending it on other things—”
“I’m not.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t tell you. Not right now.” I glanced back at the Ollie and the smugglers. We could bail out. Find some other, cheaper way, and eventually cross the border.
Except that Edo was landing in New York in three days.
“Fine. Forget the money,” I said. “I need something else.” I told him what I wanted him to do.
Rovil made sputtering noises. “Lyda, I have a high-level job, I can’t just—”
“Sure you can. How many sick days have you taken this year?”
“None! But that’s because—”
“Then you’re due. Look, you’re in this, too. This is the One-Ten. You and I, we agreed to keep it off the market. Don’t you want to know who’s doing this?”
He took a heavy breath.
“Thanks, kid.”
I walked back to the table, and Ollie registered the look on my face. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“No worries,” I said. “Are we done here?”
The younger of the cigarette smugglers looked up at me and said, “Half now.”
Before I could answer, Ollie said, “Nope.”
The two men turned their attention back to her.
“We’re not going down like that Pakistani family that got stranded in the middle of the St. Lawrence,” she said.
“That wasn’t us!” the younger one said.
What Pakistani family? I thought.
“We’ll give you ten percent now,” Ollie said calmly. “Then forty percent when the rowboat arrives. The rest when we get to the other side.” She shrugged. “It’s either that, or I go to the Hell’s Angels.”
I thought, Would she really contact the Hell’s Angels? Then: There are still Hell’s Angels?
The young one started to speak again. The silver-haired man stopped him and said, “Twenty-five percent now.”
Ollie seemed to weigh the offer. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and passed an envelope under the table.
The man in the baseball cap kept it below the rim of the table and peeked inside. “Okay then.”
Before the meeting at the marina I’d given Ollie everything I had left in HashCash, less than a thousand bucks. She added everything she’d had hidden in the duffel, for a grand total of $5,500 Canadian. That was before we took the hit on the Yuan conversion. There was no second envelope. She’d just handed them our last dime.
Ollie said to them, “You have some numbers for me, now?”
The older man took out a ballpoint pen and wrote something on the back of a beer coaster. Ollie looked at it, nodded, then put it in her jacket. “See you boys tomorrow.”
* * *
Bobby was waiting for us in his Nissan. We’d left him outside like a tied-up dog, figuring a panicky schizo might frighten off the drug smugglers. Or rather, another panicky schizo. “Can we eat now?” he said. “I’m starving.”
“Get us back into the city first,” I said. “This place gives me the willies.” Ollie got in the back of the car. Before I climbed in after her, I scanned the parking lot, but there was still no sign of Dr. Gloria. The angel must have been really pissed at me. What happened to “Lo, I will be with you always”?
Once we were rolling I used the burner pen to find a curry restaurant that was still open. I put in our order, then told Bobby to step on it. I was beginning to like having a chauffeur. I should have sworn off driving years ago.
A few minutes into the ride, Ollie said to me quietly, “We don’t have the money, do we?”
I could have kissed her again for that “we.”
“Not unless there’s more in that duffel bag of yours,” I said. More than once I’d entertained the fantasy that she was Agent Skarsten, International Spy, with a secret cache of passports and stacks of bills in foreign currencies. But of course that was crazy. If Ollie had had that kind of dough she wouldn’t have spent years living above a Thai restaurant, wouldn’t have ended up in a public hospital like Guelph Western. And she sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging with me.
I’d never been rich. I’d grown up seesawing between middle class and poor, depending on whether my dad had found work or my mom was home from the hospital. But Mikala came from money, and money followed her for the rest of her days. When we were “broke” and I didn’t know how we’d afford our first apartment together, a trust fund would mature and a shower of money would descend just in time for the rent. We were invited to parties on yachts—yachts! And when Little Sprout needed an angel investor, a friend of a friend of Mikala’s father appeared, and suddenly we were being financed by the loud and large Edo Anderssen Vik.
When Mikala died, her family fought the settlement of the estate. Why give their daughter’s money to the white bitch she was going to divorce anyway? (All right, her parents never said “white bitch” to my face, but I liked to imagine they said it amongst themselves, because reverse-racism was the kind of racism my people liked best, and because “white bitch” was infinitely preferable to just plain “bitch,” because that would have meant that they hated me because of me.) I managed to hold on to the estate, but only because we were still married when she died. In the absence of a will, everything went to the surviving spouse. I gave it all away the same week the check cleared. There were plenty of times I’d wished I’d kept some of it, but this was the first time I’d ever thought so while sober.
Ollie said, “If they’d asked for more than twenty-five down, they would have walked out on us.”
“So tomorrow we may be dead, but today we still have a reservation.”
Ollie looked at me.
“See what I did there?” I said. “That was an Indian joke.”
“Oh, I got it,” she said. We were going to meet the smugglers in Cornwall, which was five hours east of Toronto, just across the St. Lawrence River from upstate New York.
I said, “What happens if we don’t show up with the money?”
“Best case, they shrug their shoulders and leave,” Ollie said. “Worst case is … worse.”
“I have to get over there,” I said.
“We could knock over a bank,” Ollie said.
“I am not driving the getaway car!” Bobby said. It wasn’t clear that he knew Ollie was joking.
We reached the curry place a half hour later. Bobby ran inside to pick up our order.
“He’s a good kid,” Ollie said.
“For someone who lives inside a Happy Meal toy.”
“He’s worried about you.”
“Bobby?”
“He thinks you’re sad. He asked me if I thought you would hurt yourself.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “How bad is it that somebody at Bobby’s level of functioning is worried about me?” Ollie didn’t answer. I asked, “So what did you tell him?”
“I said you’ve been sad as long as I’ve known you.”
“Sad? Sad? I’m not weepy. Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m just not happy. There’s a difference.”
Bobby came back with three white bags, and the inside of the car blossomed with spicy steam. I hadn’t been hungry, but suddenly I was famished. I told him to drive fast. Bobby found a parking spot amazingly close to his apartment, and we practically jogged up the stairs.
Bobby was in front, carrying the bags. The apartment door was ajar, and he nudged it open with his knee. I didn’t think anything of the door being unlocked, but Ollie, behind me, grabbed my shoulder. Again I was too slow. The person inside the room saw me.
“Lyda Rose,” Hootan said. He sat on the couch. On the floor at his feet, a chubby white boy sat cross-legged, looking worriedly at his toes. He wore nothing but bulky headphones, green sweatpants, and a fluffy white fleece vest.
I couldn’t figure out how the white boy fit in with Hootan, and then I realized he was Bobby’s roommate. Poor kid. Hootan must have dragged him out of his room and made him a hostage.