Fortune's Deadly Descent (20 page)

“And?”

“He didn’t ask to be forgiven. The stuff about the years in prison reforming him…he never said anything like that. What he said was that if he had to do it all over again, he would’ve…killed us in Portland.” He glances at Seraphina, swallows, and looks at me.

The hair on my neck has bristled up like a cat’s. I should have killed the man when I had the chance.

“He said if he’d gotten rid of us sooner, he’d be living in Aruba instead of a Swiss prison.”

Moreau shakes his head.

“My god, Oliver,” I say.

“He’s a monster, Mom.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? This whole time…You didn’t have to carry that burden. You should have told me, or
someone
.”

“I did.”

He glances toward the bed.

“Why would you tell Benicio and not
me
?”

“He wasn’t hurt the way we were. The way
you
were. I thought he could handle it.”

“All right,” I say, trailing off. “I understand. I do. I’m not upset. I don’t think I am, it’s just…”

I turn and see Moreau at the foot of the bed, wiping his forehead, a strange, guilty look in his eyes. Did he know about this too? Was he lying about the photograph? What the fuck is going
on
here? If Benicio didn’t send the photograph to Jonathon, who did?

Moreau seems to glance back and forth between Benicio and the lines on the screen behind him. He removes his hat and combs his hair with his fingers, more times than necessary. I see the gun on his hip, the strap holding it in place.

“You should leave, Oliver,” I say.

“Why?”

“
Kannst du ihn nach Hause bringen?
” I ask Seraphina.

She nods yes, slowly, as if unsure that she has given the correct answer.

“Please, Oliver. Go with her.”

“Why are you trying to get rid of me?” he says.

“Inspector, can you give them some kind of police protection at her house? I don’t doubt that Seraphina needs to get home to her aunt, and I’m pretty sure after what’s happened here that Oliver and I are both targets. Him maybe even more than me.”

“Of course,” Moreau says. “I can have them escorted from here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Oliver says.

“Oliver, please!”

I’m close enough to smell what can only be described as death, close enough to feel the vibration of the machine keeping Benicio alive. I want the impossible—to save him from that which has already happened. To travel back in time and wipe away the rancor of our last words.

And yet, the photograph. How to explain the photograph?

“I can’t breathe,” I say, realizing that I’ve started hyperventilating again, feeling my heart beating wrong, thumping and palpitating. Moreau looks alarmed.

“I need to step into the hall. I promise to come right back.”

“I prefer you to stay,” he says.

“Is that a threat?”

“
Non
.”

What is it he truly wants from me? I know he’s picked up an echo of his brother’s case in Benny’s, and it makes me sad for him, but I have no resources to spare for that.

I think:
Is this how an asthma attack feels, like drowning without the water?
I wave the others away and step out into the empty hall, telling my body,
Not now
.
For Christ’s sake, not now
. I slide down the wall and get my head between my knees and pull air into my lungs, cough it out, try again, then again, slower, understanding the paradox, that being strong in this case means relaxing every molecule of myself, and after another moment, like a switch being thrown, my heart resumes its normal rhythm.

No one has followed me into the hall.

I start replaying what Oliver just said about his father. Taking long slow breaths now, I make myself hold the words in my mind without flinching, make myself go back to the basic questions:
How did Jonathon manage this from prison, who helped, what did he have to promise in return?

When I raise my head at last, I catch a sliver of a woman entering the bathroom down the hall. Small hips and dark hair rolling down her shoulders. She moves in a strikingly familiar way, her tiny hands quick, as if orchestrating the air in front of her. I think she saw me, but I’m unsure.

The bathroom door clangs shut.

I rise, carefully, and, supporting myself along the wall, make my way into the bathroom. No one is at the sink. I stoop to see under the stall doors. Only one is occupied—a woman with cheap-looking sandals, and small, caramel-colored feet.

I grip the sink and stand. I hear jangling, as if she’s searching for something in her purse.

There’s no time to think. I back out quietly and rush to Benicio’s room. Moreau glances at me, quickly frowns. I’m about to open my mouth and tell him Isabel is just down the hall, but all at once I rethink the whole thing.

Oliver and Seraphina have stopped talking and fixed their eyes on me.

When I look back, Moreau is now studying Benicio while scratching the top of his head, a nervous tic, it seems, which pulls open his jacket and reveals his gun, the strap holding it in place.

The lights on the screen behind Benicio spike as if he’s reading my thoughts. As if he’s pleading for me to stop. Or begging me to hurry. I touch his hand and the lines spike again. His mouth twitches while the rest of him remains ashen and still. Under the guise of grief, I lower my head and think this through. I only have seconds and I’ve already wasted too many. How long does it take to leave a stall, wash one’s hands, and, if I’m lucky, adjust one’s hair or put on lip gloss?

I turn to Oliver. “I love you, sweetheart. You need to do what I said.”

He starts to protest, and then stops. Seraphina stares at us both. They must sense the heat bubbling beneath my skin.

I know my strength is compromised, so I spin and shout from the gut, focusing all of my energy into the strike. My right shoulder crashes into Moreau’s sternum, sending him backward. I grip his pistol with both hands and yank it free.

He stumbles to the floor, one hand protecting his head against the corner of the table. He’s only half-successful. By the time he lands and I’m pointing his gun at his legs, a trickle of blood is sluicing past his eye.

Seraphina shrieks behind me. Oliver yells over her, trying to calm her and get me to stop at the same time.

Moreau has his hands in the air. He lifts his eyebrows and juts his chin out in what appears to be amused defeat. “You see, you are using me as well,” he says.

“There’s something I have to do.”

“
Mais oui
,” he says.

Seraphina quiets.

“What the
hell
?” Oliver says.

I tell him to hand me my things, holding out my free arm. “
Hurry
!”

Oliver loops my purse over my shoulder.

“The computer too.”

“I need that,” Oliver says.

“I need it more.
C’mon
. Benicio’s phone and wallet, too. The bag, over there next to his bed.”

Oliver is sixteen again, huffing while doing what I ask.

“See that they get the protection you promised,” I tell Moreau. “Oliver, don’t let him leave this room for at least five minutes.”

“That makes me an accomplice.”

“Right. Never mind. I never said that, Inspector. Oliver has nothing to do with this.”

And everything to do with it
, I think.

Seraphina presses the fingertips of both hands to her lips as she stares at the gun. “Oh god. Tell her I’m not a criminal, you guys. Apologize for me. I don’t have time—”

“But it would be our pleasure,” Moreau says, laying the Cockney accent on thick.

I crash through the bathroom door at the same moment the woman comes out. Our faces collide, she shouts and fumbles backward, holding her nose. She garbles curses in French. She is not Isabel. Aside from her long dark hair and smallish frame, she looks nothing like her.

Christ, good work, Celia
, I think in a flash.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, slipping the gun behind the computer case dangling at my side. Did she see it?

She blurts again, her almost-black eyes burning.

“
Pardon
,” I say. “
Pardonez
?”

She seems to consider ripping into me again, but instead tightens her grip on her purse strap and storms off.

The fluorescent lights buzz like a rabble of yellow jackets. The air is clogged with chemical scents meant to mask the smells of bodies—I can feel my skin absorbing it.
What do I do now?
Time feels like a huge, desolate ocean I will never get across. Benny may
never
be found. The e-mailed photo could have been taken within hours of his kidnapping. The kidnappers have already shown what they’re capable of. Benny could already be dead.

I stand like a harrowed ghost in front of the mirror. I no longer recognize myself…eyes sunk into dark sockets, hair ratted, clumped, a
gun
in my hand. What had I planned to do in here, assuming it
was
Isabel? Send a bullet straight into her heart? Or
torture
her like the most patient of sadists?

Any moment someone will burst through the door and arrest me. Moreau will have no choice but to throw me in jail now. My search for Benny is over. Benicio’s life may be as well. For the first time, I get a stark shot of Oliver out in the future, alone, stripped of all family.

I backhand the pistol butt into the mirror, making a little knuckle of ground glass that radiates long silvery cracks. I strike it again, once, twice, then the whole thing crashes down around the sink, clattering and ringing to the tile floor, spattering me and everything else with a million knife points of light.

I snatch a large shard from the sink, weigh it in my palm. One swipe is all it would take, and scarcely any pain.

Could I do it? Is this what I want?

Why am I even thinking this?

What I want is a single fucking
trace
of Benny.

I toss the glass into the sink, take a quick look at my hand, and see that, small favors, I haven’t nicked myself. I have possibly only a few seconds to get out of here. I nudge the door open with my knee and check the hallway. Two guys in scrubs pass across the mouth of the adjoining hall, oblivious. I secure the computer strap on my shoulder, and start out, but just thinking
laptop
jars loose what Moreau asked me in the car.
Where did you get the computer?

Grab this thought, Celia
.

Europe, or the United States?
he wanted to know.

It was a gift. From Benicio
.
He bought it in LA
.

What does it matter?

I come this close to letting it fall away, to walking back to Benicio’s room and turning myself in to Moreau. But then I simply
get
it, Moreau’s point. “Dear god,” I say to the empty bathroom. The
GPS
. My American computer came with global positioning software. It can be
traced
. I can find the goddamn computer within
minutes
.

And with it, Benny.

“Surprise!” Benicio said as he set the box on the kitchen table. “Look what I brought home from your motherland.”

“Honey. First of all, Switzerland is my motherland. The US is more like the daughterland. And second of all, you didn’t have to do that.”

“You mean you didn’t want me to.”

“I like my old computer. It works fine.”

“You can take the woman out of the middle class, but you can’t take the middle class out of the woman.”

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said, even as I pulled it out and ran my fingertips over its glossy cover.

“It’s
thin
,” I said.

“Mm-hmm.” He leaned across the table and kissed me softly. He started to pull back and I kissed him again. “Yum. I missed you.”

He smiled. “You need to get over your resistance to new technology,” he said, sitting down across from me. “It won’t take long to learn the new stuff on this one. I promise you. And look at
this
innovation: the ‘m’ doesn’t come loose when you hit it.”

“Poor ‘m.’ I’ll miss snapping it back into place every time I write
mime
.”

“Or
mama mia
.”

“Or
make me
,” I said.

“Or
make mad love, Mama
.”

“Yes. That especially.”

“And if it ever goes missing, it’s got GPS, like the car—you can track it. I already put the serial number into a website so check your e-mail.”

“Serious overkill, seeing as I hardly leave the house.”

“Yes, well, you never know. I like to be prepared. They don’t call me the man for every occasion for nothing.”

“You’re confusing yourself with MacGyver.”

“MacGyver, another word you can now spell correctly on the first try. And don’t forget, MacGyver’s got nothing on me. Watch me make a rope out of an eyelash.”

“All right, funny man,” I said, as the computer turned on. “It’s actually very pretty.” I tapped the keys. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

He kissed my forehead as he rose from the table. “Brought to you by the letter
m
.”

* * *

That night I hide in the backseat of my Rover in the parking garage in Aix. No Internet or phone service belowground—I just have to wait. I manage three hours of sleep before the nightmares begin. After that, I stay awake watching rats. Their muddy brown coats are a ghoulish green in the yellow light. They scatter beneath cars, scurry up and over garbage bins. I bang my foot on the floorboard every few minutes at the thought of one crawling
into the engine and then, what do I know, finding its way into the cab. But they disappear with the sun; not long after, the town comes to life, and so do I.

Years ago, Benicio taught me the art of hiding in plain sight. In Mexico, it took a pair of flip-flops, sunglasses, and a purse from a discount store. In Zurich, a scarf around my neck made me look casual and local. Here in Aix, I pull my hair into a severe bun, make myself up like a model, and enter a high-end store on the Cours Mirabeau where I pay cash for a gaudy golden thigh-length jacket and matching heels. I throw in a necklace and froufrou earrings I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and the irony’s not lost on me—that I may very well die in this getup. Lastly, I buy a zebra-print suitcase in which I stash my old shoes and jacket, along with Oliver’s computer. The gun and the rest of my cash shift around inside my purse as I strut down the boulevard feeling cheap.