The Dismantling (11 page)

“Sir?”

She was back, his clerk, handing him the key and his license, leading him down a hallway to a set of double metal doors. She unlocked the doors, and he followed her down a narrow row of brass-fronted boxes running up to the low ceiling. They stopped, and she slid the bank key into the upper lock of DaSilva's box. Simon slid his key into the lower lock; they turned the keys in unison. She removed the oblong box from its slot and handed it to him with a grave formality. He nodded, carrying the box to a small room at the back of the vault and closing the door behind him. He placed the box onto a plastic table, sat on a foldout chair. Inside the box were bundled stacks of cash, crisp and fresh, smelling of ink. He transferred the cash into his messenger bag, one bundle at a time. When the box was empty, he closed the lid and sat for a moment, trying to get his breathing under control. It still unnerved him, handling this much money; he didn't know if he'd ever get used to it.

He didn't know exactly how DaSilva manufactured the cash. The recipients made their checks out to Health Solutions, and Simon placed the checks into the office safe. DaSilva had never explained through what process of laundering alchemy those checks became the cash in this, and all the other, deposit boxes, and Simon thought it best if he didn't know anyway.

His next stop was a Bank of America in the East Fifties, a bright, low-ceilinged space installed on the ground floor of a brutalist office tower, and he collected the rest of the payment from the deposit box there without incident. Outside again, his bag heavy with cash, he watched the light fade from the sky with a certain finality. People rushed along the street, collars pulled tight; the days of lingering, of strolling, were nearly done for the year. The thought hit him: What if he just left? Took the $145,000 and split. He could hole up in some remote, cheap corner of the country, whittle away at the cash while he figured out what sort of a life he could stand to live. God knows he wouldn't be leaving very much behind, besides his father (and if anyone could understand such an abrupt withdrawal from a prior mode of existence, it was Michael Worth). He wondered how far DaSilva would go to find him, what sort of resources his employer had at his disposal. He wondered, not for the first time, whether DaSilva was an ambitious regular guy—an inveterate hustler, maybe, but no more—who'd stumbled upon a criminal opportunity too good to pass up, or a budding career criminal in deep cover. It was a long way from designing fake IDs to tampering with financial and medical records, violating medical law and ethics, and laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. The question was one of temperament or, to put it another way, of whether DaSilva was the kind of person who regarded intimidation and violence as the cost of doing business. Because that, to Simon, was a criminal: someone who considers anybody standing between them and what they want as an object to be eliminated in as expedient and permanent a manner as possible.

But who was Simon kidding? This line of inquiry was pointless. He wasn't going anywhere. He didn't have the balls, and, besides, he wouldn't be stealing from DaSilva—he'd be stealing from Maria, and he wasn't going to screw her over like that.

 • • • 

H
e took the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square and walked the few blocks to the Royal Crown. On the twenty-ninth floor, he found the door to Maria's room and knocked. He heard a rustling, and the door opened partway, the lock chain pulling taut. Half of Maria's face filled the crack, a single deep-black eye. She closed the door, and he heard the chain fall free, the door opening fully for him now. Maria retreated to the bed as he stepped into the room. The overhead light was off, the bedside lamp throwing an orange circle across the bed, the side chair, a swath of wall. The radiator gurgled and hissed in the corner. The heat was turned up too high, and there was an odd odor in the air, something sour and chemical. Maria gingerly lay back against the stacked pillows. On the bedside table stood a row of orange plastic pill bottles. The television played on mute, teenage girls screaming silently at each other outside a nightclub. Maria wore a baggy gray sweatshirt and flannel pants, her black hair falling lankly over the white pillows. She gave Simon a fatigued, drugged smile.

He sat down in the chair, the bag in his lap. “How are you feeling?”

“I'm feeling,” she said, “just fucking peachy.”

“Did the Cabrera people treat you okay?”

“I wish I could tell you, but I don't really remember.” Her voice was thick, syrupy. She pointed at the bag. “Did you bring me a present?”

“Your money.” He opened the bag, tilted it toward her to show the cash inside. “We've also arranged for you to see a doctor when you're back in California.” He placed the sheet with the doctor's information onto the bed beside her. “It's important that you see him as soon as you get home. Okay?”

“All business,” she mumbled.

“What?”

“Want to see the sutures?” She clutched at the hem of her sweatshirt. “I'll show them to you.”

“I don't—”

She pulled up the sweatshirt. Her abdomen was flat, some faint stretch marks creeping above the waistband of her pants. He let his eye drift toward what she wanted to show him, the upside-down Y, its central branch beginning below her sternum and running through her belly button before splitting, the two prongs diving into the hollows of her hip bones. The cut was covered by medical tape, but he could see the shadow of the suture underneath, an eel slipping through murky water. The skin around the edges of the tape was red and puffy, an ointment of some kind glistening in the light of the lamp. She sat up straight, sucking in her stomach, the wound rippling with her breathing. He glanced up at her face, and she was looking down at her abdomen dazedly, the pink tip of her tongue probing the cracked corner of her lips, as though she couldn't quite believe what had been done to her. Then she lay back against the pillows, letting the sweatshirt fall. She winced and grabbed at her stomach.

“Jesus
Christ
.” Her face screwed up in pain, and then she relaxed again, opening her eyes and staring at the ceiling. “He almost fucked it up. Him and his bitch of a wife.”

“Who? Lenny?”

“Before I left, the doctors wanted me to go see him and say good-bye. Because we're so close and everything. I limp in, and that woman says, ‘So this is her.' Like she's surprised.”

“That's . . . Who was in the room?”

“The coordinator. And two nurses.”

“The coordinator? You mean Peter DaSilva?”

“Yeah. She's sitting in her chair staring at me. Lenny—tubes running into his nose and mouth and stomach—he mumbled something to her. I couldn't hear what, but he sounded pissed. If you were in the room, you'd know she never saw me before in her life. You haven't heard anything about it, have you?”

“No.”

She looked at him, her eyes suddenly lucid. “It's DaSilva, isn't it?”

“What is?”

“Your contact at the hospital.”

“I don't have a con—”

“Simon. Please. The whole thing, it was too smooth. Somebody's greasing the wheels in there.”

Simon shook his head.

“He didn't blink,” she said. “He just stuck to the script, talking about what a fast recovery I'd made. What a blessing it all was. He knew what was going on. I could tell.”

“That's just not the case.” It seemed somehow obscene to lie to her as she lay there wounded and diminished on the bed, but he didn't see any other choice. “Sorry.”

She sighed. “Whatever. Fine.” She looked at the TV, turned it off with an irritated flick of the remote. “Just tell me I don't have to worry about it.”

“About what?”

“The hospital coming after me. Or Lenny. Asking questions. Looking for this.” She pointed her toes toward the bag on the floor.

“You don't have to worry about it.”

“Okay. I want to get on the train on Monday and leave it all behind.”

“That's what's going to happen.” He looked around at the chaos of the room, socks and underwear hanging off the radiator, lotions and nail files and toiletries spilled across the bathroom counter. “I can take you to Penn Station if you want.”

“I'll be fine.” She pointed at the bag with her foot again. “I think I have enough cash for a taxi.”

“Tell me you'll go see the doctor when you get home.”

“I'll see him.”

Simon stood, sweat pooling in the small of his back. Maria closed her eyes, and he thought for a moment she might have fallen asleep. He felt an impulse to sit next to her on the bed, to stroke her forehead, hold her clammy hand. A strand of hair stuck to her cheek, curled underneath her bottom lip. He stepped toward the door, and then she opened her eyes and said, “I forgot something when I was showing you the suture.” She propped herself up onto her elbows, wincing again. “Look.” She pulled the sweatshirt up and peeled off the top portion of tape. The incision was black and yellowish purple, puckered at its quilted junction like a pair of bruised lips, but that wasn't what she was trying to show him. She pointed to a chocolate-colored birthmark a few inches below her sternum that had been bisected by the cut. It was irregular, vaguely oval: a coffee stain, a dirty cloud. Simon leaned in closer as Maria tilted her torso toward the lamp. He could see that the birthmark's two halves had not been aligned properly during the sewing-up of her abdomen; one had been set a half inch or so higher than the other. The marred birthmark seemed in its asymmetry more grotesque than the scar itself, more unnatural, and abruptly, in one vertiginous moment, Maria's wound swallowed up the rest of the room, the rest of the world: the halved birthmark, the bruised tissue, the sheen of ointment.

He stepped back, bumping into the chair.

“Yeah, well. Like I said, I don't wear a lot of bikinis.” She shrugged, let the sweatshirt fall again. “This”—she nodded at the money—“it's going to save my life. You don't even understand. Anyway. Take care of yourself, Simon.”

 • • • 

H
E
couldn't sleep that night. After an hour, he rose from his bed and pulled open the shades, leaving the lights off. He watched a black rope of water uncoil as it slid past the river's near bank, and then he turned away, closing the shades and switching on the bedside lamp. He opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and removed a metal lockbox. He sat on the edge of his bed, in the lamp's pool of light, with the box in his lap. It was Amelia's. Simon had taken the lockbox and its contents during the two weeks between her death and his father's stripping of her room. He remembered pushing the door open gently, gingerly. He'd felt as though he were moving within a dream or a hallucination, an interval outside the normal flow of time, in which Amelia was absent, and upon his return to the real world, he would find her here, in her bedroom again, still angry at him and still alive. He discovered the lockbox under her bed, pushed into the far corner against the wall. He took it back into his room and solved the four-digit combination on his first guess. The code was her birthday; locking the box seemed to be a ritual, not an actual protection against anyone who knew her well opening it. Inside was a small red notebook held shut with a black elastic strap. His nerves sang: her diary. He opened the book to its first page to begin reading, but he found he couldn't do it. His eyes filled with sudden tears; the letters on the page blurred and swam. The dream ruptured. The notion that she was gone and that he could have saved her took on the heavy gravity of truth. He felt in his gut the first spasms of overwhelming guilt, like the probing tendrils of fever in the hours before it fully seizes the body. He closed the diary and slipped the elastic strap back into place, and he let himself cry.

He spun the lock now, lifted the lid, and took the diary out of the box, placing it on his bed. Seven years later, it remained unread. He removed the other two objects and laid them by the diary's side. One was a woven hemp bracelet her high school boyfriend had given to her, the kind a kid might make at summer camp. The other was a series of drawings in ballpoint pen of a Venus flytrap, its exterior electric green, the lining a fleshy pink. The plant's mouth was opened wide and the fringe rimming the mouth had been exaggerated into fangs, each tooth tapering to a point dripping with saliva. Amelia's flytrap possessed a tongue as well, a thin, curling protuberance on the tip of which sat a small girl with wings, a Tinker Bell–like figure, her legs hanging over the edge of the tongue, her eyes looking dreamily off into the distance as though unaware of the jaws poised above and below. The image had been drawn on a sheet of drafting paper in four iterations, each sharper and more complex than the next. These were sketches for a tattoo Amelia had planned to get inked onto the space between her shoulder blades. He had found them in her desk drawer, on top of a stack of discarded ideas—an octopus, a lotus, Mount Fuji and its reflection in a pool of water.

He'd brought the lockbox to college with him, and for a while he'd worn the hemp bracelet as though it were a fetish or a pathetic attempt at some kind of communion. The university had been built at the top of a steep hill, with a moribund upstate town at the bottom. During the winter, which never seemed to end, the road up the hill would ice over, and the students could choose between a freezing, laborious walk up from the town's bars or a ride chauffeured by the self-reportedly least drunk of their friends. This situation didn't concern Simon, who rarely left his room for anything other than classes and meals. He could purchase pot from a kid down the hall, and this was what he decided to do with his free time during freshman year, finishing his class work around midnight and puffing at a glass pipe shaped like a blowfish until he passed out. One night, in the middle of January, he sat on his bed, stoned and sleepless, staring into the open lockbox. The bracelet sat on top of the red diary. He took it out, retied the frayed knot. He lit the red candle that sat in a puddle of dried wax on his dresser, pressing a softened wad of wax onto the knot, sealing the bracelet around his wrist.