Bombshell (16 page)

“You never told me what happened to my parents.”

“I told you in your sleep, and more, baby, every night, at Herland.”

“I know, Nona. That's why I didn't need to ask.”

NONA LAVEAU RECLINED ON HER ANTIQUE CHAISE LOUNGE, HER HEAD
resting against a red velvet pillow. She smoked a cigarette, balancing a
plastic action figure on her chest, animating its articulated limbs with her other hand. Nona dragged on the tobacco, exhaling the smoke over the doll, watching her emerge from the gray fog unscathed. The raven-haired doll wore glossy red boots with a white seam at her shins, a blue skirt adorned with white stars, and a red bodice embroidered with a golden eagle. Her wrists were wrapped in impenetrable bracelets, and her hair was held back from her face with a golden diadem with a single red star embedded in the crown. Nona addressed the doll. “Wonder Woman, you have faced the dangers of radiation before, in fiery explosions at bomb test sites, and in the tails of wild frigid comets. You are an Amazon warrior. You represent my friend, my baby, my Cash, breaking through.”

Nona felt herself to exist between two distinct and discrete planes, where what represented truth, physics, natural justice, and morality for one did not necessarily correspond with the other. There was the plane of the brute mundane; and there was the ornate, phantasmagoric plane of
Li Grand Zombi
. She regarded them as quintessentially masculine and feminine. Their war was broken only by uneasy truces. In one world, Cash was a criminal, but across the muddy water and secret histories and voodoo, the sin lost its sheen and the crime was its own atonement. On the gorgeous green plane of
Li Grand Zombi
, Cash was a magical heroine. It was on that plane that Nona recalled Cash's shadowed parents, and it was there that she had rescued and concealed her at Herland almost twenty years ago.

April 19, 1987. Portland, Oregon. In one more stolen week, their daughter Varvara, who they called Varyushka, would be one year old. Fog was suspended in the pine boughs of Silicon Forest and moved in damp billows toward the blue-gray bridges along the river, red brick buildings, and warehouses, gradually conforming to the city as the morning opened. Gulls strutted along the arms of steel cranes. Downtown, the man and the
woman pushed their sleeping daughter in her stroller, the plastic wheels rattling, weaving a random pattern between the offices and store buildings, the rising shutters of the cafés and the banks, crossing the paths and cutting across the damp grass of Chapman Square, casting furtive glances back over their coat shoulders. The traffic in the wash of SW Madison Street slowed and stopped for a red light.

“Let's go across here,” the man, Cash's father, urged. “Do you remember, on the ship, when I told you that I felt like Leon Trotsky going to Mexico? Well, I don't intend to feel any ice picks.”

“Do you think they're still following us?” Her mother wore a brown silk scarf over her hair. She cast it into the gutter, shedding another disguise.

“Yes, I'm sure they are, but I can't see them, can you?”

Her mother shook her head.

“My heart is breaking and I am terrified, more frightened than when the reactor was on fire and I was giving birth.”

“Hurry!”

“If we could lose them, then we would not have to go through with it.”

“We're not going to be able to lose them. Someone informed on us, as though we are spies.” Her father coughed into a handkerchief as they reached the opposite sidewalk, and the traffic began to move again. “I'm sorry. But Varyushka will be safer.”

“Damn it, I feel that
any
of these people,
any
of these cars might be them.”

“Around this next corner, quick!”

They turned onto SW Fifth Avenue. A young woman was walking toward them. She had light, coffee-toned skin, red-brown dreadlocks pulled back from her freckled face, and she wore denim dungarees and a white T-shirt beneath her open parka jacket, the wet nylon fur curling across her shoulders.

Her mother gripped her father's elbow sharply and nodded her head in the direction of the young woman, whispering, “Her!” She glanced back over her shoulder once more, seeing no one directly behind them. The man and the woman accosted the girl with their eyes full of tears.

“Please help us!”

“What is your name?” the man asked. They spoke with Russian accents.

“Nona. Nona Laveau.” Nona's shoulders rose as she cringed back slightly in the shock of being apprehended by the strange couple.

“Nona,” the woman said, “please pick our child up from the stroller.”

“What?”

“Please!” The woman clasped her hands together, wringing them in panic.

“Okay, okay.” Nona lifted the infant nervously from the stroller, and the man held out a small plastic bracelet toward her, before pressing it into her fingers and gripping it there.

“This bracelet will explain. We call her Varyushka. Tell her that her parents love her, and that we are sorry.”

“Hey! What the hell? Wait!” Nona protested.

They could feel the danger collecting behind them, a flurry of black shapes rising into a tenebrous throbbing wave in the swollen street. Suddenly, the two strangers began to run, pushing the empty, rattling stroller along before them. Nona watched in disbelief, holding the sleeping child to her breast, retreating, stunned and pressing herself close to one of the trees that grew between the sidewalk paving slabs. The black van did not register her. It moved smoothly, and then decelerated rapidly as it drew level with the runners without creating brake noise. Nona saw sliding doors open and four men plucked the runners from the street, slipping black hoods over the gasping faces of their quarry that did not have time even to cry out.

APRIL 9, 2011. MOLLY STOOD IN THE SMOKE-SHROUDED GARDEN,
considering the pyre as it reduced, not having smelled burning human flesh since Vietnam, embers blowing across her boots. The remains of the man named Spicer were completely incinerated. Thoughts of Cash evoked a nebulous maternal feeling in her, but she had no means of being in contact. She would have to wait for Cash to call from a pay phone or a motel. Her digital watch chimed the hour. It was 8
AM
when she lit a cigarette from the remnants of the bonfire. It's a pity about that rug, she thought. Suddenly, she heard a clear wholesome voice from the front of the house.

“Hello? Hey, anyone here? I heard you fix cars.”

Molly crossed from the back of Cash's property to her own, stepped in through the back door, and emerged cautiously from the greenhouse workshop, wiping her hands with a rag. “What's the problem?”

Robert Dresner stood with his back to a battered canary yellow Subaru Baja. He was dressed in dirty jeans and a camouflage jacket, aviator sunglasses pushed up into his hairline. He rubbed his hand along his unshaven jaw. “It's shifting weird . . . fluids . . . I don't know. Can you give her a look? Carla at the bar said you were the best around. I'm Dave, by the way.”

Molly walked toward the car. The man looked like a part-time hunter. “Can you pop the hood?” This she said to another man who was sitting inside at the driver's position, also dressed for the field: camouflage jacket and a brown waxed cap.

“Are you okay?” Dresner asked, half lifting his hand to gesture at Molly's bruised face, the oxidized blood in the splits in her lips. He scanned the vacant hills as if looking for prey.

“Cut myself shaving.” Molly smiled. “Don't worry, I won't smoke while I check your car.” As she lifted the cigarette to her lips to drag on it, something stung her in her throat. Instinctively, her hand reached up to kill the insect that must have bitten her, but instead, she pulled a small needle dart from the flesh close to her trachea.

Dresner stepped through the acrid smoke as the swirling dark tornado of the poison descended upon her, forcing her facedown to the dented hood of the car. He caught her as she lost consciousness. “Royce, give me a hand.” It was Royce whom he suspected that he had to be wary of, who might betray him before he could present some meaningful atonement for Spicer. By involving Royce in this detail, he was determined to make him feel complicit and guarantee his silence. Together, they shoved the flaccid form of Molly Pinkerton into the backseat. “Check the first house and the backyard. I don't like that fire.” Dresner sat behind the wheel and started the engine, watching Royce disappear. He stared at his watch. It
took Royce just under three minutes to return. When he did, his face was white and bloodless. Coughing, he closed the door to the suspect's house behind him. Dresner, who had taken the driver's seat, noticed that he was carrying a plastic grocery bag.

“All I could find.” Royce was trembling.

Looking inside it, Robert Dresner saw only a sack of ashes and the unmistakable form of a shard of human jawbone retaining five teeth. He steadied himself before speaking. “That's him. Let's go.”

As they wound through the empty hills with stray dogs on the red escarpments, neither man spoke. Yet, Dresner was aware of the shivering of his subordinate's lips, and the mercury of occasional tears that would break and race over his cheeks. Wordlessly, Royce's shock screwed out of him.

When Molly regained herself, the cold of the polished metal gurney penetrated her skin and an arc of blinding white lights craned over her on angular chrome stalks. She had no sense of how much time had passed. There was no point in asking where she was being held. She knew that it was beyond the map. She could tell that her head had been shaved, and that even beyond the beatings, there were fresh cuts and bruises from razors ranged across her scalp. The walls were a pale institutional green. She tested herself, but her limbs had been restrained by squeaking rubber hoses, an octopus arrangement of tourniquets rendering her quadriplegic yet full of an obtuse pain from the poison, a hangover of every nerve and cell. Robert Dresner entered her field of vision, wearing the warm smile of a drunken surgeon, something between cavalier malice and expert sympathy. She recognized him. He addressed her:

“Jack Torma.”

His familiar voice resounded within the hard chamber and swam in the drugs blurring her system. Molly had not heard that name in decades. It was a sucker punch. She tried to shake her head, but a concrete ache in her neck muscles prevented it.

“Don't try to speak just yet,” the voice advised. “This is going to be something of a monologue, and I have the script, right here.” Robert Dresner tapped his clipboard with a ballpoint pen.

“Who are you?” Molly's voice came as a narcotized whisper as Dresner moved about the gurney, checking the restraining hoses. His phone rang, drowning out her weak words.

Dresner saw that it was a call from The Voice. Elation lapped at the shores of his ego. He would salvage and smooth everything soon. He stepped away from the barely conscious hermaphrodite to answer the call.

“Robert, I'm assuming that you have our girl's accomplice with you.”

“Our girl?”

“You didn't enter the house, did you? Did you look at all of Spicer's photographs, or did you get squeamish? Agent Royce says that he also found only female clothes in the closet, and only feminine products in the bathroom.”

That son of a bitch!

“I thought that I would give you some hours to report to me that you were aware that we are dealing with a young woman. You might have deduced that from some of Spicer's other photographs, from the ephemera and so forth. Are you quite all right, Robert?”

Dresner could not speak.

“He's a decent man, that Royce, loyal, tenacious.”

“Yes, sir. He is.”

“Before you do anything with this Molly Pinkerton, give Spicer's last missives the respect they deserve, won't you?”

Dial tone.

The bulb of something like a sob formed in him.

Before he could act further, his phone rang again: Royce.

“You motherfucker, Royce. You piece of shit, where are you?” The line was filled with noise, the feedback of multiple voices interfering with the signal and the harsh din of distorting country music.

“Robert, I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you when I came out of the house. I was in shock, picking up bits of Spicer. I suppose I panicked.”