Red 1-2-3 (27 page)

She clenched her hands into fists, placed them just beneath her breasts, and pushed them together, as if fighting with herself.

“Jordan?”

Her knuckles grew white. She wanted to strike something.

“
Senorita Jordan?”

Anger covered her face like a mask.

“
Senorita Jordan, que pasa?”

It was the tittering of other students that brought her back to the classroom. She looked around wildly, facing the grins and low, mocking laughter. She had no idea what was happening, until she looked to the front and saw Mrs. Garcia in front of the blackboard staring directly at her. Jordan realized instantly that she’d been asked a question and hadn’t responded.

“I’m sorry . . .” she stammered.

“
En español, por favor, Jordan.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“
No estabas escuchando?”

“Yes, I was listening, I just . . .” She stopped mid-lie.

“Te pasa algo?”

“No, Mrs. Garcia. Nothing’s wrong.” This was another lie, and she knew both the teacher and the other students knew it.

“Bueno. En español, por favor, Jordan,”
Mrs. Garcia repeated.
“Cuál es el
problema?”

193

JOHN KATZENBACH

“There’s no problem. I was not . . .” She stopped, seeing that she was about to contradict herself. She understood she was supposed to reply in Spanish, but the words were just slightly out of reach. Phrases, sentences, snippets of passages from books, dialogue from movies, all in melodic Spanish, flooded into Jordan’s head. She searched desperately for the right combination with which to answer her teacher’s questions.

Mrs. Garcia hesitated. This pause allowed a couple of the other teenage girls in the class to whisper something to each other. Jordan could not quite hear what they said, but she knew it was something cutting.

She could not help herself. Standing up, she spun toward the other girls. She could see half-taunting grins in their faces. To the girl closest to her she snarled,
“Pinche puta idiota!”

The girl recoiled. Jordan wondered whether anyone had ever called her a
fucking idiot bitch
in any language.

“Jordan!” Mrs. Garcia broke in.

But this made no difference to Jordan, who felt days of fury released within her. “
Besa mi culo, puta!”
she insulted another girl.
Kiss my ass,
bitch.

One of the boys in the class half-rose, as if to come to the defense of the insulted girl, but Jordan pulled out the most common of all Spanish insults and one that she was sure the boy would know. In fact, they would all know it, she told herself.

“Chinga tu madre!”
Jordan blurted out, pointing at the boy’s chest.

“Jordan, that’s enough!” Mrs. Garcia had slipped into furious English.

She rarely did this.

Jordan could feel every eye in the room on her. She threw her head back, defiant, and was about to direct another insult at the class. She remembered an old insult from one of the books they had read earlier in the semester:
El burro sabe más que tu
. . .
The donkey knows more than you
.

She was about to shout this one out, but hesitated.

“You can either leave or stay—your choice, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia said in a slow, furious tone. “But either way, you will immediately cease what you are doing.”

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RED 1–2–3

The command demanded silence in the class. Whispers, undercover laughter, muffled obscenities all stopped.

Jordan reached down and started to collect her things. She had this vision of giving the finger to all the kids in the class, walking out, and finding some isolated, bucolic spot where she could be alone and patiently wait for her killer to find her and put an end to everything. But partway through this dramatic exit, she stopped. She looked up at Mrs. Garcia, whose red face had dimmed, and who now looked merely sad.

Jordan took a deep breath. “No,” she said suddenly.
“Ésta es mi clase
favorita.”
She sat down abruptly.

Another silence riveted the classroom. After a long pause, Mrs. Garcia cleared her throat, looked sadly again at Jordan, and muttered, “
Bueno,
”

before continuing with the day’s lesson.

Jordan sat back down in her seat and resumed staring out the window. She didn’t want to make eye contact with any of her fellow students.

Instead she thought:

Big—that was
grande.

Bad—that was
malo.

Wolf—that was
lobo.

She put them together in her head.
Grande malo lobo
. It had a nice rhythm to it. Spanish was like that, she thought. Every phrase sounded like it belonged in a song. Jordan sighed and stiffened, still refusing to turn and have any contact with her classmates. She felt like a piece of radioactive waste. She was glowing, dangerous, and no one could touch her.

When the class ended, Jordan waited for the others to leave. Mrs. Garcia had taken a seat behind her desk at the front. She gestured for Jordan to approach.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. G,” Jordan said.

The woman nodded. “I know you’re having a tough time, Jordan. Is there any way I can help?”

Do you have a gun? Can you shoot straight?
“No. But thank you.”

195

JOHN KATZENBACH

The teacher looked disappointed, but managed a small smile. “You will let me know if you think I can. Even if it’s just to talk things over. Any time. Any day. Any reason. Okay?”

Are you a killer or just a Spanish teacher?
Can you kill a man who wants
to kill me?
“Okay, Mrs. G. Thanks.”

Jordan slung her backpack over her shoulder and left the classroom.

She hadn’t gone far when she heard a buzzing noise, which she recognized as the throwaway phone that Red One had given her. She ducked into a women’s toilet and found an empty stall before removing the phone and staring at the screen.

It was a text from Red Two.

Meet tonite. Talk. Important.

She was about to reply to this, when a second text came in, from Red One.

Pickup pizza place 7.

She texted both back:
OK.

She wanted to add
If we’re still alive at 7 tonight.
She didn’t.

Then Jordan headed off to English class. The assignment that day was Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” She had read the story through twice, but decided that if her teacher asked her about it, she would pretend she hadn’t even looked at it.

What she had liked most was the Spanish waiter in the story. The older one who was willing to keep the bar open for the lonely ancient man, not the young one in a hurry to get home to his wife.

Nada y pues nada y pues nada.

She knew exactly what the waiter meant with every word, and it didn’t need any translation.

196

25

“This was the best idea I could come up with on short notice,” Red One said. “It seems like a safe place.”

A safe place
was a concept that seemed alien, except that when they were together, somehow the threat they all shared seemed diminished by divi-sion:
Terror divided by three equals what?

The three Reds were standing on a dark and narrow side street in a cone of wan light just outside the door of the Goddess Bookshop, away from the more frequented parts of the small city. Mainly women—various ages, varied shapes, including a few hand in hand with toddlers or pushing strollers—were entering the small store. The bookshop featured shelves filled with new-age novels, works on necromancy and female health issues, along with the occasional how-to volume on tarot card reading or predict-ing by astrological sign.

This night an out-of-town author was coming in for a discussion of her latest novel and rows of folding chairs had been set up throughout the modest space, close to a small podium. There was a large poster of the woman: She was between Red One and Red Two in age and wore her 197

JOHN KATZENBACH

long black hair in what Jordan considered vampire style—straight down, obscuring some of her features to give herself a mysterious although not particularly subtle look. The writer also sported an all-black outfit—boots, slacks, silk shirt, and thick woolen cape—distinguished only by a single large necklace that featured some heavy mystical sign encrusted with sparkling stones. Copies of her book were displayed in tall stacks right inside the doors. The poster indicated that it was part of an ongoing series.

This particular novel was titled
The Return of the She-Killer
and featured an exaggerated cartoonlike drawing of a Valkyrie warrior maiden on the jacket, gleaming sword drawn and battling against a squad of overmuscled yet clearly overmatched horned, helmeted Viking types. Dragons flew in the jacket background.

Karen led the other two Reds inside and steered them to some seats off to the side of the makeshift podium, where they would be able to see both the speaker and anyone entering the store. They settled into the uncomfortable steel chairs and each, without saying anything to the others, began to assess the face of everyone joining the gathering.

There were only four men in the crowd. Each looked slightly uncomfortable in a different way. The three Reds watched them furtively, looking for some telltale sign that might suggest they were looking at the Big Bad Wolf.

One man was small, wiry, with a mouselike furtiveness—but he had come in with a woman twice his size and a young daughter, whom he spent much time trying to keep from squirming in her seat. Another was a burly, bearded sort, not unlike the men on the author’s book jacket. He had a lumberjack’s build and sported a red-checked woolen jacket. But he had entered accompanied by a pink-haired, multiple-pierced young woman wearing exaggerated clothing similar to the author’s, and she had dutifully filled the man’s arms with copies of what appeared to be other books in the series and apparently tasked him with getting signatures on each. He had a beaten-dog look to him. The other two men looked more academic—thick glasses, tweed suit coats, and corduroy trousers—and both displayed their discomfort at being dragged along to the reading in 198

RED 1–2–3

their body language. Each man sat with his arms folded, slouched in a seat, bored look on his face beside a woman perched on the edge of her chair, eyes glowing, pitched forward, eagerly hanging on every word.

None of these men seemed even moderately murderous in any fashion.

This meant little to the three Reds. They were each alert to
any
possibility

—although none of them knew exactly what to look for.
I can spot a disease that might kill,
Karen thought.
I can see it in a blood test or on an X ray.

I don’t know if I can spot a killer.

Jordan’s look burrowed into each of the four men in the audience. She was more confident.
If you’re here, I’m going to know it,
she said to the Wolf that she had created in her mind’s eye. She was too young to ask herself the crippling question
How?
She kept trying to fix each of the men with a fierce eye-to-eye, but even in their discomfort they all seemed more interested in the speaker.

Sarah, conversely, kept her gaze sliding between the men. She had no belief that she would know the Big Bad Wolf even if he were standing right next to her, a bloody knife in his hand and a large sign hanging around his neck. She smiled. This made no difference to her any longer.

Each kept their eyes sweeping over the gathering like sentries on duty even as the bookstore owner gushed her introduction of the author, who stepped to the platform amidst enthusiastic applause.

“My books are
all
about
female
empowerment,” the writer began with expected emphasis.

That was the point at which each of the Reds stopped paying the slightest bit of attention to what they heard.

The speech lasted just shy of an hour and there was a predictable series of questions afterward, ranging from the specifics of one warrior-maiden’s murderous foibles to the more general complaints about the lack of main-stream publishing energy that went into books with “women’s themes.”

The session was generally humorless.

Karen in particular wanted it all to end. She shifted about on the steel chair, desperate to turn to Red Two and ask her, “
What’s
so urgent that we
had to meet tonight? What’s happened?
”

199

JOHN KATZENBACH

Other than the phone call,
she thought. That had happened to all of them. A part of Karen was angry. She was exhausted both by the torture of worry and the pain of uncertainty, and she wanted it all to stop. But she wasn’t willing to acknowledge to herself that one way of its all coming to a halt was the Big Bad Wolf ’s success.

The writer finished and basked in applause. There was a flurry of bookstore-worker activity as the author sat down behind a nearby desk, flourished a large pen, and started to sign books. On another table chocolate brownies, hummus and chips, and small plastic glasses of very cheap white and red wine were being served to those in the audience not gathering in line to fawn over the writer.

Sarah motioned toward the table. She got a stale brownie and gestured for Karen and Jordan to accompany her away from the signing and the cash register and the food table. In the midst of all the people, the three Reds were alone.

They stood in front of a wall of books on subjects ranging from abor-tion to voting rights. Their eyes were on the books—but the conversation was exclusively on something else.

Sarah started with a small, coy laugh. “Well, if the damn Wolf could sit through all that crap . . .” she said, letting her voice trail off. Even Jordan, who always seemed so intense, forced a smile.

Sarah shook her head. “Anyone have any doubt who that was on the phone last night?”

Again there was silence.

“Do you both feel like he’s getting closer and closer?” Sarah asked.

There was no need to respond to this question.