Learning to Trust: Curtain Falls (2 page)

"Get me out of here, Frederic," I whispered into his ear. "It's serious. You have to take me somewhere. Now."

"Marisa, I've got to—"

"I'm not fucking kidding!" I snarled. "Now. I'm in danger."

That word
danger
seemed to arouse something inside of him. "Okay, let's go." He turned around and led me toward his car, a BMW at the back of the lot. I climbed in and closed the door, trembling as I put the seat belt into place.

"Marisa, you really need to tell me—"

"Drive!" I screamed, the tears beginning to flow again.

"Okay, okay," he mumbled. He started up the car and backed out of the lot. A few seconds later, we were heading toward the highway. I sighed loudly, but the tears kept coming.

"God, Frederic,
he made me do it," I said between sniffles.

"
Who
made you do
what
?" Frederic asked.

"Roland made me kill Marcus!" I realized I probably shouldn't be admitting this to anyone—but that
thought unfortunately
came after I had
already
done it. He had struck oil, and now I was exploding like a geyser.

"Oh my god," Frederic said, his head sinking toward the floor. The car started to drift. "Marcus is
dead
?" He said it directly to the floor of the car.

"Frederic!" I screamed, grabbing the wheel and pulling the car back toward our side of the road and narrowly avoiding a collision with a semi. "You're going to get us killed!"

"Christ, Marisa," he said, his face overwhelmed by something. Was it
sadness
?
Regret?
"I
just
can't believe that."

"It was the restaurant downtown," I said. "The Provence. Roland made me take him a briefcase with a bomb in it."

"Goddamnit!" he shouted. "I heard about that and I knew there was something really wrong about it. They didn't release the names of the victims yet." He slammed his hands against the wheel, rage flowing through him like a drug.
"He wasn't supposed to—"

"Frederic, please!" I begged. "We need to go hide somewhere." I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be able to call
Ramón
any time soon, not with Frederic around. For some odd reason, I felt safe in his hands. I guess I was just really vulnerable.

"We're getting out of the city. Hold on." His face quickly glanced left and right, checking his mirrors with total precision.

He swerved across two lanes of traffic and onto the ramp for the expressway. I desperatel
y clung to my seat. "We've got to
have a plan," he kept saying to himself. I stayed glued to the seat while he took us further and further away from the city.

We drove in silence, and I only thought about one thing the whole time—could I tell him about
Ramón
? I kept considering it, going back and forth, the pendulum swinging in my head.
Just wait
, a voice in my head said to me. My lips stayed firmly shut as the scenery flew by.

"I know a place," he said suddenly.

"You do?"

"It will be safe, I promise."

We drove a good distance out of town in what seemed to be the opposite direction from where Roland had taken me the other day. I kept checking my cell phone compulsively, worried that my signal was going to vanish. It remained, however.

After passing through a small downtown area, we arrived at a hotel, the Paradise Inn. The sign was covered in a juxtaposition of palm trees and distorted beach imagery, even though nothing of the sort was nearby. "This is one of my old favorites," he said. "I know the owner. He'll take cash and won't put us on the books."

His words felt comforting, but still I didn't know what we were even doing here. I had asked him to get me out of the city, my pleas fueled by adrenaline and fear. Now here we were in the middle of nowhere—and I had no plan at all.

Frederic parked near the office and told me to wait in the car while he went inside.
Perfect
, I thought. He stepped out and as soon as he could no longer see me, I lifted my phone, fumbling with the buttons as I tried to bring
Ramón
's number back up. The call went through, the rings taking an eternity.

"Hello?"

"
Ramón
!" I shouted.

"Is that you Marisa?"

"Yes," I cried. I felt so much joy and relief at the fact that maybe I'd stand a chance now. "Why did you make me do it?" The tears were beginning again.

"Shit, that
was
you, wasn't it?" I heard him grumbling in the background, obviously a bit shocked at the news. "Damnit!"

"You told me I should do it! I killed those people! I carried in that briefcase."

"Jesus, calm down, Marisa. You're not to blame. You got used
by those assholes
."

"Duh!" I said. "You expect me to just live with that? I want to get the hell out of this. I don't want to be involved anymore."

There was a long pause that might not have actually been that long
since time
was just generally
crawling
. "Fine, fine," he said with desperation in his voice. "Where are you?"

"I'm at some motel with Frederic. I ran away from Roland's office. He hasn't tried to contact me."

"Okay, well stay there for a little longer. I need to figure some things out. Are you alone?" It sounded like he was shifting around papers on a desk.

"I'm with Frederic."

"Don't say anything to him. I mean it. And shut off your phone, unless you want Roland figurin
g out where you are
."

"I think the big deal is happening really soon," I said, almost as an afterthought. "He mentioned that it could go through now that Marcus was gone."

"Sweet Jesus," he remarked. "Can you—"

Frederic re-emerged from the office and was briskly moving toward the car. "I've gotta go!" I hung up and threw the phone into my lap, hoping he didn't see it up against my ear.
I pressed my thumb against the power button and held it until the phone started to turn off.

He opened his door and climbed back inside. "All right, we've got a room. I'm going to park the car in the back so it's not so obvious."
Had he seen me on the phone
?

The engine roared to life again and then we headed on the very brief journey to the back of the building. Apparently, he hadn't seen my phone call—or at least was choosing not to mention it. He parked the car tight to the building, so close that it was going to be difficult for me to escape from the car. "I'm still not sure what we're doing yet," he said pathetically.

"We'll figure something out."

I somehow managed to squeeze out of my door and then headed to the room with him, holding his arm as we walked. It was
standard hotel fare—
a small desk with a very stiff-looking recliner next to a king-size bed and a dresser that a coffee maker sat on top of. The TV was old, but functional. Frederic turned it on, possibly just as a way to distract us from the silence.

"Tell me what happened," he said suddenly.

"What?" I asked, startled by his intensity.
Was he asking about the phone call?

"About the bombing. About...Marcus," he said, his voice trailing off to nothing.

I felt that there was another layer to all of this, like Frederic was unpacking something. It was nothing but a hunch, however. "Oh," I said. "It was bad. Like really bad."

"I can't believe he didn't tell me about this," Frederic said to himself. It was obvious to me that he worried that his relationship with Roland was deteriorating, that this was just another nail in the coffin.

I spilled my guts about what had happened with Roland, how he had said he didn't trust me at all at the beginning and wanted to move forward. Mentioning the
loyalty test
seemed to rub Frederic the wrong way. Was it jealousy I was witnessing? Had he fallen out of favor with Roland?

I went on to tell about
Marcus
and how he had been so rotten to me—and how I hoped that someone would give him what he deserved. It made me sick the more I thought about it. Frederic seemed to carefully consider my words, digesting them one at a time rather than as sentences. "There was supposedly ten
million in that briefcase," I said.

"God, only Roland," he said, a hint of humor in his voice.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"That money was burned up. Dissolved. Disintegrated. Only Roland would use real money when blowing up a competitor."

A
weird
observation. I
hadn't even thought about that.

I told him about how Roland had taken me into the woods, to hide me from
the burdens of
society—and the crime I had committed. "He was a perfect gentleman the whole time," I said, the tears starting to flow again. "I just can't believe that I was having a romantic getaway while they were pulling bodies out of the burning rubble of the building."

Frederic wrapped his arm around me and held me as I cried, the emotional release almost as intense as it had been the first time when my mom called me. I knew I'd never forget this and I'd spend the rest of my life actively wishing that things hadn't turned out this way. It was that thought that made me want to finish the job, to ensure
that my efforts weren't in vain
—but what else could I do now?

Something told me that my path was going to become very clear, my choices limited, the outcome fixed. I don't know if it was excess optimism or just the hope that after so much suffering,
something
would go right.
I had grown to hate making decisions.

Frederic grabbed the entire half-filled box of tissues from the bathroom, pulling it out of the plastic frame on the sink and bringing it to me. "Thanks," I said between sniffles. I blew my nose and realized how cheap the tissues felt. "I'm going to use the whole box right now," I said jokingly.

"I can get us more if we need them," he said.

"Maybe." My stomach grumbled. I hadn't eaten anything since the morning. "I don't really want to eat, but I probably should."

"Yeah, I'll go grab us some food. I know a good place around here. Keep the door locked, okay?"

"Sure." He kissed me as I stood up, my lips stiff, yet accepting of his gesture. The door opened and closed, the outside swallowing him.

I pulled back the comforter and sprawled out on the bed, relieved that I had that moment to myself. There were strange patterns in the paint that had been used on the ceiling and my eyes followed them, looking for an identifiable shapes. It was something I had done my entire life starting when I was young and in my room for time out.

I'd sit there for the duration of my
sentence
, just staring at the shapes in the carpet, making up stories in my head about the creatures that appeared to live there. God, I wished I could be that creative anymore. The reality of life had stolen that innocent, free part of me, and in this tense moment, I realized I desperately wished I could have it back.

Once
it fully set in that
I was alone, I instinctively thought to grab my cell phone—I was
by myself
now, so I guess that meant I could call
Ramón
—but realized I didn't actually need to call anyone just yet. The phone remained off, serving no purpose aside from maybe being a paperweight. I was too scared to turn it on, worried that Roland would call me and I'd have to curse him over the
phone and face the consequences—and then he'd show up at the hotel door five minutes later.

I would have liked
to call and tell my mom that I was okay,
but it would
just
have to wait for now.

Many things passed through my mind while Frederic was g
one. I hoped he was actually
going to get some food, not carrying out a murder or
an
act of espionage. I had no way to tell anyhow, unless he came back covered in blood.

What was it like to be Frederic?
At some point, he was Roland's right-hand man, even if he wasn't in this moment. I know he had worked hard to get to his position, but what did that really even mean? I remembered when he had told me about his job managing Roland's reputation. Had that just been a bunch of bullshit to distract me from his real involvement
in Starland Enterprises
?

In reporting, I worked hard and took shitty starting positions, working my way up by doing other people's dirty work. But what was
dirty work
in a world of corporate espionage? I had an idea of what that meant, but I wasn't sure if I should entertain it. Did Frederic have to go through some situation like I did, one where he unknowingly committed an act of violence in exchange for his boss's approval? Maybe, he
knew
when he did it. Roland could have handed him a gun and said "Take care of this guy, he's really bothering me. If you don't, I'll kill you.
If you do, you get a promotion.
"