The Insides (14 page)

She snaps her attention away from him and looks through the restaurant’s window instead. She can dimly see only one pair of remaining diners, a man and a woman, a couple maybe. They’ve finished their meal and are draining the last of their drinks. The man stands, hands off some cash to the waiter; from their body language it looks like the two of them are laughing, sharing some joke.

“Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl,” Pig says, absently. “I can take them no problem.” He looks over at her. “I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” Maja says, blinking. “No. I got you here. That’s what I do, and I’ve done it.”

“It’s that side gate,” he says, continuing as though he hasn’t heard. “The service entrance. That’s the only thing. My plan is to just go through the front and I think I can secure the scene pretty quickly. But somebody could get out through that side gate. I need someone there.”

“We’ve been over this,” Maja says. Her eyes flit to the front of the restaurant: the couple is leaving. The bald bartender follows them out onto the street, he’s produced a long metal rod which he begins to insert into the grill mounting. “You pay me to get you here,” she continues. “But I don’t hurt people.”

“I’m not asking you to
hurt
anyone,” he says, a sneer in his voice. “Just keep an eye on the gate for me. You can do that, right? That’s what you’re
for
, isn’t it?
Looking
at shit?”

She compresses her lips, not wanting to dignify these questions with an answer, even accidentally.

“Well,” he says, opening his door, “consider it.”

He slams the door, then goes around and pops the trunk. She can hear him opening one of the gun cases.

She watches him walk purposefully across the street and press his pistol into the jaw of the bartender. The metal pole clatters to the pavement. Pig marches the bartender back through the door, back into the restaurant.

Maja looks away. She picks up her book and turns it around in her hands, runs her finger over the spine. She does not open it. She plants her thumb over the bar code on the back of the book as though she’s pressing a button.

Here we go
, says the Archive.

Yes
, she thinks, simply. She closes her eyes. She allows her mind to drift back, further and further, twenty thousand
years, a silent time, before the city was here, when everything was just bedrock covered with ice.

From Café Soulouque she hears a pop and a certain quantity of information is subtracted from the air.

Commotion from inside. A raised voice, barely audible from this distance. She looks up, watches a jogger trot past the storefront, wearing earbuds, noticing nothing.

A second pop.

Almost over now
, she thinks. She lets her mind drift back to the ice sheet, grinds her anxiety down with a vision of the implacable calm of the long-ago glacier. It reminds her of home. Home. She allows herself to envision the trip back, long hours on the airplane, yes, but then the part that she enjoys: walking into her cottage, turning on the lights, drawing a bath. She imagines the entire routine, the layout of the bathroom, the items on the shelf. A jar of lotion, a bottle of perfume, each in its proper place.

She hears the rattle of something, someone, hitting chain-link. She doesn’t want to open her eyes, doesn’t want to obey Pig’s imperative, but reflex wins out: she looks. She sees a young man climbing over the gate. She tries not to focus on the frantic desperation that she reads in his motions.

He clears the top of the fence and lands in a crouch, which permits her a view some sort of satchel slung across his back. Maybe the blade is in there?

She looks into the satchel and finds a box, and there’s something inside it, so she looks deeper, and the outline of a blade begins to take form, and at that very second her mind fills with white light, as though a pressure nozzle were blasting high-intensity data into her skull. She makes a sharp
noise. She rears backward, slamming her head into the passenger-side window, and the onslaught of light begins to stutter, and she can see that it is made up of images, a thick coalescence of images, too many to parse. They begin to speed up again, to blur back into an overwhelming torrent, and to stop the intake she bites her tongue as hard as she can, until she tastes blood.

She spits into her gloved hand, then slaps the glob of crimson slime away with one quick motion.

Her vision clears, and she sees Pig, clambering over the fence after the young man. He has the pistol in one hand still, so his progress is slow, clumsy; he ends up kind of rolling over the top of the fence, landing on his shoulders and neck instead of on his feet. But he rights himself quickly. He staggers out into the middle of the street, raises the pistol, and fires once after the fleeing man. But the distance is too great.

“Fuck,” shouts Pig. He lifts the gun a second time.

This really is getting stupid now
, says the Archive.

True. Maja will allow her clients to do just about anything they want to do, as long as she can still walk away, but opening fire in a public street in one of the busiest cities on the globe might be the kind of action that will expand to implicate her. She rolls down the window.

“Get in the car,” she calls.

He wheels around, looks at her uncomprehendingly, his eyes wild, his mouth distorted with frustration.

“Put down the gun,” she says, firmly, “and get in the car.”

Something shuts down in his face and a tense focus replaces the wildness. He does what she asks.

“That was him, wasn’t it?” Pig says, jamming the key into the ignition. “Not the other two. Him.”

“Yes,” Maja says, her mouth still thick with blood.

Pig starts the car and pulls away from the curb wildly. An oncoming van hits its brakes hard to avoid colliding with them.

“Calm down,” Maja says. “Drive better.”

“Calm
down
?” Pig cries, reversing savagely. “We’re going to
lose him
and you—”

“No,” Maja says. “Listen to me. We’re not going to lose him.”

“But he’s already—”

“I’ve seen him,” Maja says. “So it doesn’t matter where he goes. Not anymore. Wherever he goes, I can find him.”

The evening is hot and the cavernous space of O
VID
is crowded: there’s a four-person-deep throng between Ollie and the bar. This is the kind of scene that she likes to think of herself as hating—who wants to spend all day in a restaurant, around restaurant people, and then go out to a
different
restaurant and get drunk with
different
restaurant people? She’s said these exact words to Victor a million times. But tonight she has to admit that being here serves as a real respite after the last couple of days. If you just give yourself over to being bumped and jostled, it can become a kind of peace, like being tumbled by the sea. There are times when an elbow jammed into your back is exactly what you need to jog you out of whatever you’re thinking about, to wreck your internal narrative, to strip away your worrying details and leave you an anonymous member of a mass. Sure, she may be a little taller and a little older than the average resident of this room but the stink of a workday on her skin gets subsumed just fine by the same stink coming up off everybody else. And as
she presses her way along the edge of the impromptu dance floor, trying not to get clocked in the face by people who are flailing to the terrible EDM blasting over the sound system, she has to acknowledge that she actually does get the point of industry night—it isn’t really to be around other restaurant people, it’s to be
away from the public
, to be in a room where you
aren’t
called upon to serve as anything: where you can just be a body, animal among the bodies of others.

She makes it to the bar eventually and gets a vodka tonic. She has a sip, and follows that with a deeper sip, a sip that could probably be considered a full-on gulp. She turns away from the bar, fights against the crowd for a minute, holding her drink up at eye level so it doesn’t get knocked around too bad. She keeps an eye on faces, on the lookout for Victor or Guychardson. She sharpens her perceptions, scans the room, starts to wonder whether she was stupid to expect to find them here. And then she stops, having gotten no more than eight feet from the bar, and standing there she carefully tilts her glass into her mouth and drains the rest of her drink, and enjoys the realization that it doesn’t matter. Maybe she’ll find them, maybe she won’t. The total number of fucks she needs to give the matter is zero.

Back to the bar. A second vodka tonic ends up in her hand. Cold and perfect. And quickly finished.

O
VID’S
one of those joints where the back end basically just opens into the kitchen, and there’s another glut of people there, watching a pair of burly chefs. One is frying up pieces of battered Feta, the other is anointing the resultant bite-size wedges with quick scribbles of honey and dispensing them to the hungry audience. Behind those dudes she
can see the head chef here—famous guy, what’s his name, something Greek, Mastrokopoulous maybe, she feels like she should know this for certain. He’s grilling up massive heaps of octopus. It smells delicious—he’s getting generous with the oil and lemon juice and the grilled meat is aromatic enough to begin with—but the sight causes her to remember yesterday’s weird being, which she’d been assiduously working, tonight, to forget. She looks away, but her gaze falls instead on Misterpoppodokous’s assistant, a guy with his arms elbow-deep in a big plastic vat of salty water. He’s vigorously massaging tentacles in there. She watches them writhe around in turbulent motion.

She’d been ready for a bite but suddenly she feels a little queasy. She closes her eyes for a moment to still the swimmy feeling. Without the visual, she can go back to enjoying the smell. And it does smell delicious. She wonders whether she and Victor should have cooked that thing after all.

A hand lands on her shoulder and squeezes. Speak of the devil: it’s Victor. He’s saying something, but she can’t hear him over the dance music.

“What?” she shouts. He turns and looks at her, grinning.

“They’re letting people up on the roof,” he yells toward her ear, and he points to the service ladder, mounted to the wall between the restroom doors. Victor tugs on her sleeve, intending to draw her down that way.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles. Between the drink in her system and the fading nausea she’s not entirely sure it’s a good idea for her to be up on a ladder, or up on a roof for that matter.

“Don’t let your life be boring,” Victor hollers. “How
long has it been since you’ve been up on a motherfucking
roof
?”

She has to yield the point: she can’t remember the last time. But she can remember how it felt. In a vague sort of way she can remember that being up there and looking out over the city made everything feel right with the world. Tonight she could use a way back to that feeling, and so she nods once and goes along.

She leads the way up the ladder, climbs about twenty feet. Once she’s almost reached the ceiling, her head almost at the level of the propped-open trapdoor, she pauses, twists around to look out over the heads of the people at the bar, over the churn of the dance floor. She looks all the way back to the front of the house, her eye drawn by the glowing glass spheres garlanded there in a constellation around the doors. And then she sees Guychardson come in. She frowns: even from this distance she can see that something is wrong. His face is pale and slick; the orange LED light gives it an infernal cast. She watches him for a long second, waiting for him to come the rest of the way into the restaurant, but he just stands there, gazing about restlessly, his head yanking from one position to another, as though it’s being pulled by a string.

“Guychardson’s here,” she shouts down to Victor.

“Who?” Victor yells back.

Ollie sighs. She considers clambering back down to greet Guychardson, but reversing the flow of people coming up behind her seems logistically impossible. Instead she thrusts one arm out, away from the ladder’s rungs, to wave at him unsteadily. After a moment his head snaps in her direction,
and he gives a tiny jerk of recognition, and then begins to make his way through the crowd, toward her, moving bodies gently with the back of his hand.

Once she sees this, she ascends through the trapdoor and emerges onto the roof. It’s quieter out there, but only just: being outside cuts the high-end and mid from the sound system inside, but there’s still plenty of bass booming out, giving everything a swamped, underwater quality, as though the floods have come and reclaimed Manhattan, as predicted, as though the stone cornices and planes of mirrored glass she can see from up here are all actually at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Young people in fashionable street wear have gathered at the edge of the roof in a thick cluster, firing bottle rockets out into the night. She’s not sure how long they’ll be able to get away with that at two a.m., especially post-9/11 two a.m., but for now everybody seems to be having a great time. The rockets scream and pop and the crowd cheers and the young people trade fist bumps and kisses.

“So cute at that age,” Victor says, and he sips his drink, something electric blue, like toilet-bowl cleaner. Ollie has no clear idea how Victor managed to climb a ladder with a drink in his hand without spilling any, without even dislodging the curlicue of lemon rind perched on the edge of his glass. Maybe he used magic. A little jealous, she reaches out to take the glass from him.

“Ut!” he says, slapping her hand away. “Get your own.”

She looks around up here for a bar or even an unclaimed drink on a ledge somewhere, but to no avail. What she does eventually see is Guychardson, climbing up through the
trapdoor. He doesn’t look any better up close. If anything, he looks worse: his face is sweaty, his eyes are glazed, his breathing shallow. She’s seen some people look pretty rough after August shifts in hot kitchens—she’s sure she doesn’t exactly look zestfully clean after her own double—but he looks like he’s just spent a day enduring combat operations in some godforsaken jungle.