“Please to both.”
“All right. But you have to call me Rachel.” She pronounced it with a guttural ch, like Germans do.
“Yes, Rachel. Thank you.”
“Sit down. He doesn’t bite.”
Paul sat down next to the boy, who didn’t seem particularly surprised to have a strange guest sitting at the breakfast table with him.
The humidity seemed to be gone today. Butter-yellow sunlight was streaming in between the geraniums in the window box. If his wife and daughter were back home, the three of them would’ve strolled into Central Park today and spread out a picnic blanket in Sheep Meadow. They would’ve luxuriated in the newfound aura of family.
Later, after Paul had taken a shower, after he had dressed in one of Miles’ crisply ironed shirts generously provided by his wife, after he had read two newspapers—one of them Jewish, which he dutifully leafed through without understanding one word—after he had basically done anything to keep from jumping out of his skin, Miles called.
“Okay,” he said. “Brace yourself. I got through.”
“What?”
“I called a few more times last night—nothing. Ten times this morning—still nothing. I finally got him this afternoon. Our friend Pablo.”
“And?” Paul felt the vague stirring of hope.
“He was suspicious, of course. To put it mildly. First he denied even knowing you. Even when I told him who I was, that I know everything that happened there. After a while he said okay, he might know you a little, but he had no idea what I was talking about. He drove you places, that’s it. I told him to relax—no one’s going to the police. His memory seemed to come back then. I told him about the house being burned down. I assured him we’ve still got the drugs. I think it’s going to be okay. He’s going to get back to me. He’s going to tell us how to deliver the bag. The where and when.”
“And Joanna? And my daughter . . . Are they . . . ?”
“They’re fine.”
Paul felt the large knot that had lodged somewhere in the pit of his stomach slowly begin to unwind. At least, a little.
“I asked Pablo if he was absolutely sure about that,” Miles continued. “I laid it out for him so there’d be no mistaking. No Joanna and Joelle—no drugs. I think he got it. It’s like litigation. You have to make them think you’ve got the upper hand, even if you don’t. Who knows? Maybe we do. We’ve got their drugs, right?”
“Okay.”
“Okay? What about that’s great, Miles? That’s terrific? I’m positively overjoyed at the news?”
“I’m positively overjoyed at the news.”
“You don’t sound overjoyed at the news.”
“I’m worried.”
“Okay, you’re worried. Of course you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be in your shoes? Have some faith, I’ll lend you mine if you like—no charge. I told you. We’re going to get this done. He’s going to call back, we’re going to deliver the coke and get out of Dodge.”
“It’s something else.”
“What something else?”
“What if we give them the drugs?”
“Okay?”
“But they still don’t release them?”
It was the obvious question, of course. The same question Joanna had asked him back in that room. The one he’d been avoiding looking at too closely or too often. Something that was easy enough to do when he was dodging U.S. Customs inspectors and drug-dealing kids.
Not now. Not when he was finally about to get two million dollars’ worth of drugs into the right hands.
Miles shrugged. “I don’t know how to answer that. I think trusting them’s the price of admission. Sorry, that’s pretty much the way it is.”
TWENTY-TWO
They took her somewhere else without warning.
The middle of the night? The middle of the day? She didn’t know. Only that she’d fallen into one of those bottomless slumbers and was happily in the middle of a sweet dream. The sweetest. She was home with Paul on what seemed like a lazy summer afternoon. A Sunday maybe, where they’d stumble out of bed around ten or so to secure a Sunday Times and two iced Starbucks.
The dream had that Sunday feel.
Then the door slammed open—she perceived it as a thunderclap outside their 84th Street apartment. Rainstorm to follow.
What actually followed was someone pulling her up off the mattress and directly out of her dream. Accompanied by the acrid odor of nervous, sweaty men. And the sound of harsh orders delivered in a quasi English they must’ve picked up from kung fu videos.
“Chop-chop,” one of the men—boys really—said to her. “Vamos.”
Then the ski mask came down over her head, only backward, so that the eye holes were somewhere behind her, and all she could see was blackness.
She wondered if this was it. The end. The first steps on her way to a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere in particular. A candidate for one of those gruesome pictures in the newspapers. She tasted her own fear—a sour tang on the back of her tongue.
She’d been thinking a lot of her own death lately. Ever since Galina had summarily informed her of Paul’s failure to come through. It had the power and solemnity of a death sentence being read by a hanging judge.
Not that.
Not only that. It was the demeanor of her guards. The boy who brought Joanna her daily breakfast no longer acted like a room service waiter hoping for a tip. There was no smiling good morning. Someone had gotten the message to him: She was no longer a cash cow, but a sacrificial lamb.
The other guards too. Gruff, sour, pissed off. They spoke to her with barely restrained anger and thinly disguised contempt.
She could smell the menace in the air.
Now this. She was being pulled out the door, along a hallway, then suddenly down some steps—one, two, three—she stumbled and nearly fell. They’d tied her hands together with rope—the harsh fibers dug into her wrists.
“I can’t see,” she said. She hated the panic in her voice—the helpless-victimness of it.
She was a veteran of H.R. departments. She was used to victims parading before her desk, please-don’t-hurt-me kind of girls—they were almost always girls, sobbingly relating one abuse or another. She would nod, smile, and comfort, but there was always a small part of her that wanted to say why didn’t you stand up for yourself? Why?
Now she was like them, reduced to naked pleading. Her wrists were already burning and she was still inside the house. She could smell the odor of burned grease, butter, pineapple. They had to be walking through the kitchen. Not walking—stumbling, tripping, flailing.
No one had answered her. Or maybe they had. When she said I can’t see, whoever was pulling her forward had tugged sharply on the rope. She banged her shoulder into the wall.
This was their answer. Shut up.
She knew she was outside from the sudden sharp smell of pine, the sweet scent of hibiscus, and the familiar if nauseating smell of gasoline. The air felt different—that too. It had the texture of night, already swollen with morning dew. It felt painfully sweet to be outside again. To breathe the cool air and feel a soft breeze against her throat. Only she was being taken away—from what she knew to what she didn’t.
From Joelle.
A car door opened.
But it wasn’t a door. She was pitched forward into a trunk. No gentle hands to break her fall. Her cheek met the car trunk floor flush. She cried out from the sudden pain in her jaw.