12 Bliss Street (18 page)

“And then?” Lou asked. “After a while you changed your mind?”

“And then—oh, I don’t know. I began to wonder, I guess. That soup was delicious.”

Lou took the stack of bowls to the sink and closed the kitchen blinds, then set the skillet to soak. The night had lost all of its original romance. A woman sitting at the kitchen table, crying over her brother who was—murdered? As she listened to Carmen, Nicola could feel her heart start to race. She didn’t know if she was being very, very stupid or not.

“At a certain point we should consider the police,” she said.

Carmen tore more crust. “What can they do? They’ll say it was suicide.”

“You said that before. Why do you think that?” Lou asked.

“There was a note in the printer tray. Not even signed. Also, I found an empty bottle of pills—methadone. But when does Robert take methadone? He’s not a junkie; maybe he drinks a little too much, but that’s it. I just don’t buy it.”

Nicola tried to be gentle. “You say he was seriously in debt to this man? This Lightwell?”

“He owed him a lot of money.”

Nicola took a breath, then paused. She and Lou looked across the room at each other. But Carmen caught their look.

“It was
not
suicide,” she said again fiercely. She pulled out her laptop and put it on the kitchen chair beside her and turned it on. “Look at this,” she said.

*   *   *

The scissors caught
the light from the bare bulb and he was glad he just had them sharpened. He threw away the bedspread each time and he bought new pillowcases and new posters for the wall but the scissors were always the same—German hairstyling scissors with long blades and small finger holes. The boy had thin fingers, which is why Chorizo hired him. Not that there was much competition.

The boy put his fingers in the finger holes, then, blades closed, he lay the metal over the girl’s throat. No movement. Her chest went up and down only slightly as she breathed and the end of the scissors pointed straight out at the camera. Chorizo stepped quickly to the other side of the bed for a better angle and the boy opened the scissors and cut once into the air.

*   *   *

“This is what
he does,” Carmen said.

She opened an image file on her computer.

“I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think the girl is dead.”

Nicola and Lou stared at the image.

*   *   *

“Now,” Chorizo said.

The boy moved down over the girl’s body—thank God she was still hanging on—and began cutting. First the white straps, exposing her shoulders. Then the bodice. He made a long incision lengthwise, smoothly rending the white silk into two pieces. Her chemise opened, became a vest, but the boy did not pull it aside; instead he cut a strip of material out and then another. He was cutting her clothes off. She was absolutely still.

“Good, good,” Chorizo said. “Be careful of her skin.”

Ricky cut some more, making smaller and smaller cuts, drawing the process out. Sometimes he made shapes: long flat ovals, trapezoids. A not-very-good squiggle of lightning. Flaps of white material fell away from her or hung like feathers near her skin.

Chorizo watched through the viewfinder. “I want only the suggestion of blood.”

The idea was a kind of transference—you didn’t see the skin cut but you felt the skin was cut. In a few minutes the chemise lay in pieces. When there was no more to slice, the boy looked down for a moment then moved to her panties.

“Careful, careful,” Chorizo told him.

The panties were white silk too. Ricky started at one leg hole then cut a line to the opposite one.

“Careful.”

The material fell away. It took only a few seconds. The boy was visible from behind. The girl’s arms were at her sides, limp, palms up. Her head was turned and her eyes were not fully closed. Her lips had turned a deeper blue.

“That’s it,” Chorizo said.

The boy fell forward for a moment, losing his balance, and nicked her with the scissors. “Ooh,” said the boy.

“Christ,” Chorizo said. He stopped filming. A small dot of blood appeared on her thigh.

“Christ,” Chorizo said again. The inside of his mouth felt slick, as if lined with sesame oil from that night’s Kung Pao chicken. He wanted to take the audience to the edge, make them see the blood without seeing it. Feel the death without doing it. The spiritual warrior is at one with the physical plane, but in a sense he moves beyond it. He finds the spirit within the object. There would be no blood and yet the audience would swear there was blood, because the sense—the
spirit
—of blood is there.

Chorizo felt the back of his hair with his fingers while Ricky looked up at him, waiting to hear what to do. He thought about the audience, middle-aged men with credit cards sitting at a desk chair holding the crotch of their blue jeans or chinos or suit pants, what have you, watching the scissors snip snip at what might have been her throat, watching the clothes fall away, both their hands moving together, sitting in the den or in the family room with the television off, late at night, the family in bed, or maybe they lived alone, maybe they lived with their mother, maybe they were getting a business degree at night or they were in some frat house in a college on the eastern seaboard and they were saying to a frat brother man you gotta see this. Look at this, man, come here a minute, oh shit, oh my God! Their voices getting higher. He thought about all the men with their credit cards and their secret desire to duck under society, to get out of its tedious grip, and why shouldn’t he give them that pleasure for a fee? He would give them that pleasure and he would see his wife out of jail with their money, why not? Because they were not warriors. They were not priests. They were not shamans. They were not healers. They ate, they watched, they took anything offered without thought. The underlying meaning would be lost to them, absolutely—this he always knew. Still, one wants to do one’s best.

Chorizo adjusted the chain of his bracelet and felt his hair with his hand again then looked back through the lens. Ricky was still waiting.

“Oh well, fuck it,” he said to Ricky, “go ahead.”

*   *   *

It was difficult
to tell if the girl in the image was alive or not. Nicola moved the laptop from the chair to the table.

“When did you find the picture?” she asked.

“I didn’t find it, I copied it. I took it home. Now I realize how incredibly stupid that was. I never looked at any of the files before.”

“Were they all images?”

“What if Robert was killed because I…”

“Wait,” Nicola said. “First I want to know, were all the files images like this one?”

“I don’t really know,” Carmen said. “They were compressed in various ways.”

“How did you decide to take this one?”

“It was one of the ones he threw away, that’s all. I found it in the computer’s trash can.”

There was a knock on the door and Carmen gasped. “Do you know who it is? Don’t open it!” she said quickly. As she took hold of the kitchen table, Nicola noticed she wore a small silver ring on her thumb in the shape of a snake.

“It’s all right,” Nicola said. “I know who it is. I made a phone call a few minutes ago. Don’t worry.”

She came back with Davette.

“See,” Lou said. “It’s all right.”

“This is Davette,” Nicola said. “She’s our resident hacker.”

Davette looked around the kitchen. She had dyed her hair an orangy-yellow color and was wearing a short black skirt underneath her puffy coat.

“Where’s Dave?” she asked.

“I didn’t call Dave,” Nicola told her.

Carmen was still clutching the edge of the table. Davette took off her coat and set her airline laptop case down on the floor. After Nicola offered her food and gave her a glass of mineral water, she told her what had happened to Robert. She watched Davette’s face closely. Her expression didn’t change although her color deepened.

“This is the landlord?” she asked.

“And we think there’s more going on,” Nicola said. She pulled Carmen’s computer onto the table and showed Davette the image of the girl on a bed. “Carmen feels that … well maybe you should say what you think, Carmen.”

“The man who did that is going to kill me,” she said.

Davette glanced at Nicola. Nicola suddenly remembered she was only sixteen or seventeen, a girl. But Davette only said, “Well, we won’t let him.”

Lou said, “Do you think you can find out more about Robert’s Web site? There might be a connection between that and this … this girl here.”

“I think so,” Davette said. “But first.” She reached inside her airline bag and searched around until she finally found something. It looked like a matchbox.

“Pocket spell for luck,” Lou read aloud, looking over Davette’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

“A pocket spell,” Davette explained. “For luck.”

She did the spell with tiny white candles on a white saucer and a small gray pebble glued to a leaf. “Lucky rock,” Davette chanted, “lucky circle, lucky day, lucky hour, lucky me.”

Afterwards she looked up at Nicola, who was still standing next to her. Nicola blew out the candles.

“There,” Davette said. She gave the plate with the spell circle to Lou, then looked at Carmen.

“You’ll be all right,” she told her, and pulled the laptop closer.

*   *   *

The girl’s silk
camisole lay—if not in threads, then in long white strips that led away from her body like snakes leaving a log. But she was not dead. Not yet. Ricky sat next to her and began making himself hard. He had to get himself ready on his own because nothing worked too well in that area these days. Chorizo, bored, watched him do it.

Meanwhile the girl breathed slowly and unevenly. Her skin was that extraordinary color. He wished he could pick it up better on video.

“All right, then,” he said.

Ricky climbed on top of her and began to move. The girl groaned; she was still hanging on. She didn’t know what was happening, it was probably like a wonderfully vague dream. Or so Chorizo hoped. For her sake, he hoped so.

His wife accused him of being tender-hearted, but surely she couldn’t accuse him of that now. She was the one who wrote letters and sabotaged—or tried to—various Turkish or Greek offices of government. She, with her Turkish father and her Greek mother, hated both sides. What did she want? Anarchy, she would say. The end of nationalism. But she didn’t really know what she wanted. She was angry; she was well read. At various times she said various things. For the press she had all sorts of ridiculous statements.

And the most ridiculous thing of all was the way she’d been caught—a prematurely exploding bomb. Her own bomb. She was lucky she wasn’t dead herself. But her hands … her hands! thought Chorizo. At the trial she had hoped she could make some statements, but they wouldn’t admit political discourse. So it was all for nothing! Chorizo’s face contorted. Her beautiful hands.

He made himself focus on the bed. Ricky was right there, moving on top of the girl, her filmy skin, a coldness that seemed to start from her heart. These Americans, Chorizo thought. For a moment he felt the bitterness his wife felt—although in her case it was all about who governed Cyprus—the sense of being with the wrong people and hating the people for being wrong. Americans. Everything on the surface, everything easy, everything in control. A narrowness of mind that was almost staggering.

And the remarkable thing was that they
liked
this, this what Ricky was doing. The Americans
liked
this. It was for them a turn-on. A man on top of a comatose women, naked, her clothes cut away. Fucking her to her death.

He had to sit a minute. Take a breath, center himself. It was his fault for letting thoughts of his wife creep in.

The spiritual warrior is at one with the world.

When he looked back up the scene seemed different. Was the girl still breathing? He listened for the death rattle—each time it sounded slightly different. The first time he thought it was a cough, a cough without movement, a cough without opening her mouth. Then he realized. Now he watched closely as the girl’s eyes opened slightly, two slits looking at something halfway across the room. Her skin, he knew, was growing colder. The sound was forming in her throat.

“What the fuck,” Ricky said suddenly. He started to get off of the girl.

“Don’t stop!” Chorizo ordered. But he was surprised, too.

It was remarkable. Her eyes had opened fully, looking Ricky right in the face. Like she knew exactly what they were doing.

“She’s freakin me out. Man, stop it.”

He started to cover the girl’s face with his hand.

“No, don’t do that.”

Then all at once she relaxed and closed her eyes again.

“Man,” Ricky said. And settled back down.

Chorizo panned back. River? Was that the girl’s name?

*   *   *

Davette found the
Web site they had gotten to before and began running a program in the background to get more information about it.

“It has a different IP address than Robert’s,” she said. “I’m going to hack into the server. Find out when it was last updated.”

A line of files and dates appeared in a separate window.

“Any of these names look familiar?” she asked Carmen.

“Those are the files I copied for him. Look, there’s one that’s still compressed.”

“Hmm,” Davette said, frowning.

“What?” asked Nicola.

“Not all of these filenames match what’s on the site. It could just be that he didn’t end up using all the files. Let’s just see. Let’s just look around a little.”

Davette launched several programs at once and after the third one got going Nicola watched the screen, amazed. Davette was really a pro for someone so young. Nicola found herself thinking about her own days in high school. She was such a good student, so active, so competent, and yet always the vice president—the one who ran around organizing what everyone else wanted. Now she was the one making decisions while someone else did the work.

Carmen washed her face at the kitchen sink, then went into the living room to lie down, and Nicola brought her a Mexican blanket. After that she had nothing to do.