“My model looks like an institution in Oslo?” Perhaps someone did tell him about Oslo, he thinks, but it wasn’t her.
In the dark she turns to him. “You’re making it worse.”
“I made it before I knew you. I’ve never been to Oslo. It’s far, isn’t it? Farther than Spain?”
“Why won’t you admit it’s cruel?”
“I promise it was a church,” he lies.
He feels her staring at him. “A lion wearing a crown? Holding a gold axe?”
“I don’t know where that came from.”
“A crowned lion holding a gold axe,” she says, “is the symbol of Norway.”
197.
He wakes again at five-thirty in the morning. It takes him a moment to realize she’s up and moving around in the dark. “I have to go to work,” she says. Is she rummaging through his clothes? “I’m taking a pair of your jeans,” she says. In the dark he can see her holding one of his white shirts. “I’ll use your belt. May I take your belt?”
“Yes.”
She cinches around her waist the belt she tightened around his neck the night before. She says, “Your work, how is it?”
“All right.”
“Go back to sleep, but not too late. You don’t want to miss work.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s a good job. You don’t want to lose it.”
198.
Every night she lies between his legs like his dream; and then one night he turns
199.
to the suite’s empty doorway, and the cylinders in his head click into
200.
place, and he sits up from the bed. She stops and says, “What is it?”
“Where’s Zazi?”
“What?”
“Where’s Zazi?”
“I told you. She’s in L.A. With friends.”
“You said with friends. Then you said with her father. Then you said with friends.”
“What does it matter?”
201.
“‘What does it matter?’” he repeats. He gets up from bed in the dark and begins putting on his clothes.
“Where are you going?” she asks. He doesn’t answer. He finishes dressing, slipping on a coat.
202.
By the time he’s down to the hotel lobby, she’s caught up with him, pulling on her own clothes. “Stop,” she says, grabbing him by the arm, but he doesn’t stop. Out at the street in the cold night, the doorman hails a cab.
He says, opening the cab door, “You can come or not.” A panic is in her eyes. He gets in the cab and she darts in after him before the cab pulls away.
203.
It’s one-thirty in the morning. At the parking structure on Thirty-Fourth Street, he gives some money to the driver and gets out, leaving the door open behind him. “What are you doing?” she keeps saying. He walks into the structure and wanders among the aisles of cars on the first level, then walks up the concrete stairs to the second level, then the third.
204.
In the midst of the parked cars on the third level, he turns to her and says, “Where is it?”
“What?”
“The car.” He begins searching again.
“I moved it,” she says, “it’s parked in another structure now.”
“Where?”
She shivers in the parking lot. Her mind races almost audibly. “Back uptown,” she says. Then, “Out in Queens.”
“Is it uptown or out in Queens?”
“I …”
“Is she with friends or with her father?”
205.
When she doesn’t answer, he turns and sees a black Mustang at the end of the lot. Three thousand miles from Los Angeles, he didn’t believe it would really be the black Mustang.
206.
He walks toward the car. Again she grabs him by the arm to pull him back, again he pulls his arm away. She stops in her footsteps and begins screaming. “All right then! All right!” He reaches the Mustang and peers through the window into the backseat and sees a form huddled under some blankets. The form sits up and looks back at him.
207.
He rattles the handle of the car door. The young girl inside the car reaches over and unlocks it.
208.
Vikar sticks his head in the car. It’s strewn with the cellophane wrap of eaten junk food, MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam cups. Zazi must see something in his face because she retreats, pulling the blankets up around her.
209.
When Vikar turns to Soledad and steps toward her, in this moment she sees in his eyes the person she was afraid of when they first met.
He slams the back window of the car with his fist and glass implodes. Both Soledad and Zazi scream.
His bloody hand hangs at his side. The girl begins crying. “Oh mother,” Vikar says, then reaches to Zazi with his other hand as she draws away from him amid the glass.
210.
Soledad sobs, “You’re frightening her.”
“I’m frightening her?” Vikar says. The wrath that seemed momentarily satisfied when he smashed the window returns.
“No,” Zazi calls to Vikar when he takes another step toward her mother.
“Now do you want to see bárbaro?” Vikar says to Soledad, raising his bloody fist.
“Don’t,” says the girl.
“All these nights your daughter is sleeping in the car?” says Vikar. “Do you believe you’re the Whore of God, to sacrifice your child on the altar of pleasure?”
“Mi dios,” Soledad cries.
“He’s not my god,” he says. “Look.” He turns his head. “This is the profile of the one who wants you,” and turns his head back, “this is the profile of the one who would kill you, for sacrificing your nine-year-old child.”
“Diablo.”
Zazi says to him, “Don’t. I’m O.K.” She adds, “Actually, I’m eleven now.”
211.
In the corners of the parking lot’s concrete bunker, homeless people look up from the rags where they sleep. Crying, Soledad rushes Vikar and pounds his chest. “Don’t you think I’m trying?” she blurts. “Don’t you think? Driving all the way from L.A. for this shitty little part in this shitty little movie?”
“By spending your nights with me?” he says. “You try to take care of her by sp—?”
“Yes!” Her pounding exhausts itself. “It’s exactly what I’m trying to do!”
Vikar begins walking away. He gets halfway across the parking lot and turns; his hand leaves a trail of blood. “Come on,” he says.
Soledad still cries.
“Come on.” He motions to Zazi.
“Where?” Soledad finally says. “I can’t sleep with you when she’s with us. It’s not right.”
“Come on.”
212.
Back at the suite, mother and daughter sleep in the bedroom and Vikar finally falls asleep on the couch. Both are gone when he wakes. He doesn’t go to work but lies on the couch looking at the remains of his model church on the floor.
213.
On the fourth day, someone slips something under the door. He still lies on the couch. Another hour passes before he rises from the couch and walks to the door; it’s that day’s Variety. A small notice in the bottom left-hand corner of the second-to-last page is circled in purple, announcing that United Artists has brought onto its “troubled” production of Your Pale Blue Eyes a “respected Academy Award-nominated” editor to take over the project in its “final stage.” I wonder if this is how Dotty found out. An hour and a half later Vikar gets a call from the Sherry-Netherland front desk, informing him his balance is paid through the next day.