Circles of Confusion (21 page)

Claire had read that the portion of the brain responsible for processing smells was one of the more primitive parts, making it the sense that aroused the most emotions. The same article had talked about what smells people associated with their childhoods, saying that people over fifty associated being a kid with natural scents, like bread baking or the sweetish smell of manure, while anyone younger than fifty thought of childhood when they smelled artificial smells, like the scent of crayons or Play-Doh. For Claire it happened when she smelled a particular kind of cheap plastic—a reminder of a doll that had miraculously materialized under the Christmas tree straight from the pages of the Sears Wish Book. Or sometimes at work when she ripped open a freshly printed pack of forms she would be back in fifth grade again, sniffing the milky scent of mimeograph paper.

She hit the button on her black rubber wristwatch and set off. New York didn't look so unconquerable when seen at this hour, in this place. Without the streams of honking cars and sidewalks full of rushing people, Claire was free to glory in the buildings that stretched up to the sky and the wide wet street that ran between them as straight as a ruler. She felt a surge of energy rise from her belly to her chest, a wordless joy at life's possibilities. It was hard to believe that a single phone call from her mother had led her here.

As she ran, she passed an old couple in their Sunday best, speaking what she thought was French. Taking no chances on the overcast sky, they shared the shelter of an oversized black umbrella. The doorway of a sub shop held a bundle of rags that proved to be a sleeping human being. A Lycraed woman Rollerbladed past Claire, her taut figure belied by her middle-aged face. While the gutter held scraps of paper and an occasional pile of dog droppings, Claire thought the city was remarkably clean. People had obediently filled the street-corner wastebaskets with paper cups and candy wrappers and discarded yellow and black Playbills left over from the night before.

Claire settled into an easy pace. On these flat streets she could run forever, at least until she ruined her knees by pounding on pavement. She thought about Troy and Dante. Her last meeting with Dante had ended awkwardly, with her promising to call him when she got back to Portland, promising to think about lending him the painting so he could arrange to have it tested, while thinking to herself she didn't know what she would do. She needed more time to think, to weigh the various opinions Troy and Dante had offered her.

The two men were so different. Dante clearly wanted her painting, while Troy claimed to want her. But Claire wondered how much Troy's fascination, too, lay not in her but in a foot-square painting of a woman with a letter in her hands and an unreadable expression on her face.

Troy surprised Claire by showing up minus a limousine or even a car. They walked a few blocks to a deli he suggested, which was again a surprise. The people who filled it were mostly tourists, and Troy, in his dark, fashionably cut suit, stood out among them like a swan among seagulls.

Over bagels, cream cheese and lox, they spent more than an hour exchanging stories. Or, more accurately, Troy regaled her with tales about some of Avery's famous clients. A rock musician who snorted cocaine off the viewing room's table. An actor who bought an abstract painting for several million only to hang it upside down. She told a few stories of her own about Custom Plates, but mostly she just listened, aware of the minutes slipping by. She was Cinderella watching the clock edge toward midnight, and tomorrow the drudgery would begin again.

Finally she said, "I really have to get back to my hotel if I'm going to make it to the airport on time."

"No—is it that late?" Troy looked at his watch. "Damn—I forgot I had promised to call someone this morning. Would you excuse me for a moment?"

Claire studied him as he used a phone in the lobby. He was so different from any other man she had ever known. Then she amended that. So different from the men in Portland, at least. Dante was in many ways like Troy. Both were strikingly handsome. And both were smart. Only Troy moved through the upper strata of New York City's society—while Dante looked as if he might know the city's underbelly.

Claire watched as Troy punched a series of numbers into the pay phone, listened, punched in some more numbers, then finally hung up. Voice mail hell, she guessed. She was familiar with it herself from work. Every day, it seemed, she was forced to listen to a woman's voice—complete with a false note of sadness—saying, "I'm sorry. That is not a valid option or password," when Claire had been trying for neither, but simply to leave a message for another state employee. The thought of state employees reminded her that she had one more task to fulfill before she boarded the plane. She was ordering a dozen bagels from the man behind the counter when Troy rejoined her.

"Don't trust plane food?"

"There's an unwritten social contract at work that anyone who goes on vacation has to return with an edible souvenir. It was either this or some of those big pretzels they sell on the street."

Troy pulled a face. "They keep those pretzels stacked up to the rafters in warehouses in Jersey, with the rats running over them."

"Guess I made the right choice, then."

"Maybe you should break the rule and see what happens. It doesn't sound like you like the people you work with all that much."

"Oh, most of them are all right," Claire said, thinking of Lori. With some effort, she pushed away a mental picture of sitting in Roland's office tomorrow, surrounded by elephants and the miasma of his sullen lust.

As they left the deli, Troy took her free hand. "I wish you had more time here. Promise me you'll come back."

"I want to," she said, but it was Dante's face that flashed into her mind. In a few days her adventures here would seem like a dream.

"What are you thinking about?" Troy was examining her with a half-smile.

"Just that I don't want to go home." They had slowed to a walk and now were standing outside an apartment building. The glass doors revealed floors of black and white marble. Between two elevators was a huge arrangement of colorful flowers. Only a few inches away from them, but on the other side of the glass, the doorman sat reading a tabloid, seemingly oblivious to their presence.

"That's the only thing you're thinking?" Troy didn't give her time to answer, just took her chin in his hand and gave her a kiss. To anchor her in the world, Claire kept her eyes open, so that she saw the edge of Troy's face, a slice of the sidewalk on which they stood, the doorman's expressionless eyes watching them.

After a second, Claire stepped back. "I don't know, Troy," she said, not spelling out what she didn't know. "I have to go now or I'll miss my plane." Already, though, Troy seemed insubstantial, like a character in a movie who was so real on-screen but faded away by the time you walked to your car.

"Call me," he said, and she nodded without speaking, then walked the last block to the hotel.

As she pulled open the hotel's heavy brass-bound glass door, Claire was nearly bowled over by a man in a dark overcoat wearing a hat pulled low. His flat, acne-scarred face registered nothing, even when she fell to one knee.

At the touch of her key, the door to Claire's hotel room swung open. She let out a startled gasp. A whirlwind had been through it, leaving nothing untouched. The mattress was upended, her suitcase emptied out and flung on top of the heap of her clothes, all the drawers pulled free from the dresser.

The upholstered chair that had stood next to the bed was now turned on its side. The netting on the bottom had been roughly torn away. Claire's breath hung suspended. She was staring into an empty cavity that had once held her painting.

Long before the taxi driver pulled to a stop at La Guardia, Claire had a ten and a twenty ready, clutched in damp fingers. She had spent the entire trip peering over the edge of the back seat trying to examine the drivers of the cars that swarmed around them—an impossible task. Her taxi driver, a dark-skinned man who had not said a single word during their trip, seemed to take her behavior in stride. Perhaps he was used to ferrying refugees from one calamity to another. While the taxi was still sighing to a stop, Claire thrust the money into his hand and was out the door. Underneath her buttoned-up—and, luckily, loose-fitting—jacket, she wore her backpack backward across her chest, the painting as strange and stiff as a bulletproof vest. But at least she still had it—for now.

The destruction of her hotel room had stunned Claire. The search had been hasty but thorough. Whoever had hunted through the room had found each hiding place she had, only a few hour! before, considered and rejected. They had tossed aside the mattress overturned drawers, emptied out her suitcase and slit the lining Even the bottom of the upholstered chair had been ripped open, the place where Claire had come so close to hiding the painting. She was lucky that their eyes hadn't fallen, as hers had, on the brown bulk of the air conditioner, set high in the window. It was here that she had lifted the painting the night before, taping it into place on the back, and it was here that, as she stood on her tiptoes, her searching fingers found again the reassuring give of the bubble wrap that still held the painting secure.

Claire had righted the chair and stood on it to free the painting. Only when it was in her hands did the tightness in her chest loosen a little. The bubble wrap revealed little lozenges of paint—a red fragment of carpet, a circle of cream-colored wall, a single blue eye, oddly magnified.

Only belatedly did it occur to her that whoever had done this could still be nearby. Balanced on the chair, the painting clutched to her chest, Claire eyed the closed bathroom door. Was that a faint sound? She caught her breath and strained to listen. Silence. Had she conjured the sound into being? Her eyes fell on the telephone. She could call the front desk, ask them to send someone up. Probably it would be the liveried young man whom she had passed a few minutes ago, surveying the lobby with his hands clasped in front of him. It seemed likely that he would become distracted by the mess. She could imagine him asking pointed questions about the destruction of her room, pulling out a calculator to add up the charges against her Visa card, not even looking up when the true perpetrator burst out of the bathroom, gun in hand.

There! That was definitely a sound. But now she realized what it was. A choking moan followed by a thump.

"Is there someone in there?" Claire called out. The only answer was another moan, louder this time. She hurriedly laid the painting in one of the empty drawers that had been abandoned on the carpet and covered it with the tossed-aside quilt. Taking a deep breath, she put her hand on the knob and pushed. The door gave only a few inches before it struck something waist-high made of silver metal.

Claire realized the door was jammed against the maid's cart. She shouldered her way in. In the middle of the floor was the maid herself, trussed up in a torn sheet. She lay amid a heap of canisters and bottles of various cleansers, efficiently hogtied, wrists to ankles, with a strip of white cloth over her eyes and another across her open mouth. As frantic as a bug on its back, she was straining without success against her bonds, the effort accompanied by the groans Claire had been hearing.

"It's okay!" Without planning to, Claire found herself whispering. "This is my room." The maid stopped struggling, and her head thumped softly on the floor, producing the same noise Claire had heard earlier.

The knots were pulled too tight for Claire's fingers to pick them free. She hurried to her backpack and returned with a Swiss Army knife. With great care, she slid the blade in between the woman's cheek and the white cloth, and cut away the blindfold. The woman's eyes, the pupils so dark they were nearly invisible, strained to focus on Claire before her body relaxed a little. Claire then cut the gag and pulled a wadded white washcloth from the other woman's mouth. The maid took long, shuddering breaths and worked her mouth, occasionally mumbling to herself in Spanish. Claire finished cutting her free, and the woman sat up and leaned against the white bathtub, rubbing the angry red marks on her wrists.

"Do you need a hospital?" Claire's best Spanish was rewarded with a blank look. She tried speaking more slowly. The woman shook her head, but Claire didn't know if it was because she still didn't understand her or because she was all right. She tried combining parts of a few more sentences from her Spanish tape. "Who has searched my suitcase?"

The woman's answer was in a Puerto Rican Spanish Claire could only haltingly follow. "I didn't see. I came in to clean the room. He was in the closet. Came behind me. He said I must close my eyes."

"Did he have a weapon?" The dire words from her "Let's Learn Spanish!" tape—hospital, search, weapon—were actually coming in handy.

"A gun, maybe. I felt something in my back."

Claire didn't completely understand, until the woman stood up and put a trembling finger between Claire's shoulder blades, miming the barrel of a gun—or perhaps only the tip of a finger.

"But a man, yes? Not a woman." The maid nodded, flexing her fingers as they slowly regained their color. "Was he tall or short?"

"I never saw him. All I know is that he was taller than me."

Claire realized how useless this single piece of information was. The girl—for looking at her more closely, Claire realized she was about eighteen—was also tiny, probably no more than five feet tall. Any man would be taller than her.

"He left when he started beeping."