The Insides (15 page)

All the same, she promised Victor an introduction, so: “Guychardson, this is my roommate, Victor; Victor, this is Guychardson.”

Victor smiles and puts out his hand; Guychardson shakes it, but only distractedly, as though he can’t quite remember what the convention is supposed to establish.

“Are you OK?” Ollie asks him, after an awkward pause.

“No,” Guychardson says.

“No?” Ollie repeats, a little surprised to hear this as the answer.

“I need your help,” he says.

“What’s up?”

“I am
—freaking
out,” Guychardson says.

“Why?”

“Somebody shot at me.”

Ollie blinks. “Wait, what?”

“I was at work,” Guychardson says. “And right as we were closing, a man came in. He fired shots. I think he killed—” A bottle rocket goes off, tearing apart some of his answer. When the rocket pops, he flinches and stops speaking entirely.

Ollie finds that she has clapped her hand over her mouth. She lets it drop now, and she says, “Jesus Christ. Are you OK?”

“I ran,” Guychardson says, slowly. “I came here. I knew you were here and so I came.”

Ollie blinks. “Why though?” she says. “I mean—what am I—you think I can help somehow?”

“I know what this is about,” Guychardson says.

“What
what
is about?”

“I know why this man came. I’ve been expecting him to come. Him, or someone like him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have something very valuable,” Guychardson says. “A blade. You know the one I am talking about. You have admired it.”

“I’m not sure I’d say I’ve exactly—” Ollie begins, but then all at once she can’t see the point of disagreeing in this situation.
Why lie?
, is the way she phrases it to herself. “Yeah. OK. I’ve admired it.”

Guychardson says nothing in response. Instead, he goes down into a crouch and removes his canvas backpack. She and Victor watch as Guychardson rummages for a moment and then pulls out his lacquered box, the one that he keeps the knife in. She feels a sudden impulse to reach out, to take it from his hands, but he hasn’t offered it to her, and so she holds this desire in check.

“I need to go away for a while,” he says. “Back to Haiti,” he says.

Ollie opens her mouth, then shuts it again.

“I don’t think this man will stop,” Guychardson says, slowly. “This man has come because he wants the blade, and if I stay here, he will come after me. So I have to go.”

Ollie says nothing.

“I will leave tomorrow,” he says. His voice is firm; he sounds like he’s had this plan in mind for a while. “I have to go home first. I’ll need to get my passport; I’ll need to destroy a few documents.”

“Is it safe?” Ollie says. “I mean—does this guy know where you live?”

“I don’t know,” Guychardson says. “I don’t need to be there for long. I can stay somewhere else tonight. But yes, there is a chance that this man knows where I live. And so it is better for me not to bring the blade there. Just in case. It is important—very important—that this man not take the blade from me.
That is the most important thing
. Do you understand?”

“I think so. Do you need me to—” And now she does put her hands out, offering to receive.

Guychardson looks at her for a long moment, as though he’s assessing her.

“You can keep it safe,” he says. “For one night.”

It is not quite a question, but she answers, without having to think about it. “Yes,” she says. The word comes out with unexpected solemnity, as though she’s at a wedding, making a vow.

“I believe you,” he says. He presses it toward her, and she takes it.

“I will come to work tomorrow,” he says, looking her in the face. “Before I go to the airport. I will come to work and retrieve this knife from you and, after that, you will not see me again.”

“Guychardson,” she says, “listen, you have to tell me what this is
about
. I know that the knife is magic—” At this
Guychardson winces, as though she’s blurted out a secret. She supposes she has. She tries to back up: “I’m just saying, I have experience with this kind of thing; you can let me know what’s going on.”

He seems to consider it for a moment, but then he shakes his head, a pained expression contorting his features. “It is better,” he says, “if I explain that to you another time.”

“OK,” she says, although as she says it she feels a heavy sort of certainty that this other, better time will never actually arrive.

Guychardson looks away from her. He looks around the roof, then at the surrounding buildings. He shrinks down into himself a little, as though the night had suddenly turned cold.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Wait,” Ollie says.

“Hang on to the knife,” says Guychardson. “Bring it to work tomorrow. I will see you then.”

“OK,” Ollie says, although in actuality a sort of squirming dread has awoken inside her. “Just—just tell me you’re going to be safe.”

Guychardson tells her no such thing. He turns to Victor. “It was nice to have met you,” he says.

“Likewise,” says Victor, a little quietly.

Guychardson looks at Ollie and gives her a crooked little smile, and then he turns and heads back down through the trapdoor. She stands there and looks helplessly at the lid of the box.

Victor pipes up: “He’s cute, you know. It’s too bad he’s crazy.”

“Shut up, Victor,” Ollie responds.

They stand there in silence for all of about three seconds.

“Cheer up, kiddo,” Victor says. “The world may be full of violence and strife but on the upside we have a new toy to play with.”

“Shut
up
, Victor,” she says again, with a little more vehemence.

“But we got what we
wanted
,” he says, a pout in his voice.

She doesn’t bother to respond. She’s still looking at the trapdoor through which Guychardson disappeared.

“Maybe we should go,” Victor says, after a minute, more solemnly.

“Yeah,” she says, “maybe we should.” Another shriek as another bottle rocket streaks out into the night: she jumps. She yanks her head and catches the last second of its trajectory: a spiral, twisting in on itself until,
bang
, it’s gone.

“He’s moving around,” Maja says. Her eyes are closed. Her fingers rest lightly on her forehead. She holds the young man in her mind, envisioning him as a bead of light, drifting through a luminous net of mismatched grids.

“Don’t lose him,” says Pig, steering the car around the same block for the third time. They’ve been driving aimlessly for half an hour, unwilling to leave Brooklyn but also afraid to stop moving, knowing that they aren’t that far from the double homicide they left behind them.

“I’m not going to lose him,” she says. “You need to remember that I’m actually good at this.”

“Yeah?” Pig replies. “Well,
you
need to remember that you need to tell
me
what the fuck is happening.”

“I
told
you what is happening,” she says. “He’s moving around.”

“Right, but
—moving around
like what? Like
fleeing the city
?”

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem to be heading toward an airport.”

“Bus station? Train?”

“Possibly,” she says. “He’s crossed back over to Manhattan. But unless he’s prepared to flee with only what he’s carrying—”

“We could follow him over there,” Pig says. “Go to Port Authority, head him off?”

Maja opens her eyes, thins her lips, shakes her head
no
. “If he does decide to get on a bus, you aren’t going to be able to stop him,” she says. “An enormous bus terminal is very visible, very public; it’s the last place in the world you’d want to attempt an engagement.”

“I just don’t want him to get away.”

“But that’s what I keep
telling you
,” Maja says. “He can’t
get
away. If he gets on a bus, we follow him. In fact, you
want
him to get on a bus. It puts you at an advantage. It will be easier to engage him literally anywhere a bus might go than it will be to engage him in the middle of New York City.”

As they near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, Pig pulls the car over into an open spot on the side of the street, kills the engine. “All right, fine,” Pig says. “He can’t get away. I get it. But I don’t just want to sit here.” He snaps his hand out toward the windshield, a way of condemning the street beyond it. “I want to drive. That’s my job. I drive the car, I fuck up the people who get in my way: that’s what I do. But you know what
your
job is? Your job is to get me closer to this guy. Your job is to tell me where the fuck I should be going. So why don’t you do that before I get tired
of talking to you.” She becomes aware of his presence, a big man, sweating in the August heat, filling the car with the stink of his anxiety, his impatience, his rage.

So what it will look like, between them, when he finally
does
get tired of talking to her? She understands that it could happen, and she understands that she must plan for it, prepare: the same thing she does with any other uncertainty. She assesses his capability for sudden violence, what she might use to respond to it. She’s not helpless, in a fight: she’s done some defense training, and all her swimming has made her strong, but she’s not sure she could win on force alone. She may need something else, some point of leverage to work with. A thing to look for, later. For now she answers his question, so as not to keep him waiting.

“We go back to the apartment building,” she says. “The one we visited this morning.”

“His place,” Pig says.

“He’ll need to sleep,” Maja says.

“He could sleep on a bus,” Pig grumbles.

“I’m doing my job. I believe at this junction, you do yours.”

Pig turns away from her, stares out the window at the pilings of the bridge, at the towers of Manhattan beyond the water. And then, without another word, he turns the key in the ignition, and they pull back into the street, joining the flow of the traffic, sparse here, at this hour.

She’s tracked things to all sorts of places. Storage garages. Corporate boardrooms. The vented hilltops beneath which
landfills are hidden. Institutional basements heaped with uncataloged mess, a richness of things haphazardly piled there in wood-grain-print file boxes. Not every job ends up outside the door of someone’s home. But some do.

They are parked across the street from the young man’s apartment, and they are waiting, and, as she does at times like this, she is remembering the first time she waited outside someone’s home, remembering the ugly house with the orange shutters. The house with the bat in its yard, the bat that had killed her brother.

Some of her clients, caught up in the excitement of being this close to having what they want, like to describe what it is they are doing at times like this by using the word
stakeout
. The word pleases her with its Americanness,
stake-out
, the way it uses great action in the service of describing something that is actually very boring. She would only ever say that she waits.

If you’d been watching her that first time, outside the house where the boy who murdered her brother lived, you would have seen little more than a teenage girl with a red bicycle standing at the edge of a yard, looking down at a bat for a long time. Eventually you would have seen her walk across the street, park her bicycle, sit on top of a low stone wall. She took off her backpack, unwrapped a cheese sandwich that she had packed for herself, and began to eat it. She worked slowly through it until all she had left was one tiny dry corner of bread that she held between her thumb and forefinger. She flicked this into the road, then looked at it for a long moment. Inside herself, she was wondering if someone would ever be able to connect that little fragment
back to her, if anyone would ever be able to tell that she’d been here. Not one car had gone by in the entire time she had been eating her sandwich.

Nevertheless, she moved her bike behind the stone wall, so it couldn’t be seen from the road, just in case. She lingered there for a while, sitting in the grass, hidden from view, looking at the lichens and the grasses growing between the stones. She admired their simple forms, which contained nothing beyond a record of the singular urge to push on. Straightforward in a way that she could aspire to. A few cars did eventually roll by but she felt certain that they could not see her.

She waited. There was still the opportunity to go home, to resolve this some other way, and as she waited she contemplated this opportunity. But she did not leave.

She could feel when the boy was coming, and then she heard the tread of his footsteps on the road, but still she waited, until she heard him turn onto the garden path that led to the door. And then she rose from behind the stone wall and for the first time she saw him with her own eyes. He was not facing her but he had the long hair, the denim jacket, that she recognized from Eivind’s memories. He had headphones on and keys jangling in his hand; he was humming, half-singing, as he climbed the three steps leading to the door. She walked briskly across the street, stepped over the low garden wall to enter the yard, reached down and lifted the bat, and continued on, heading in a diagonal toward the brick path, falling directly into the space behind the boy as he stood on the stoop, looking for his key.

Her swimming had made her strong. For when it mattered.

“He’s coming,” she says, when she’s sure. It’s almost three in the morning.

Pig, wearing his mask, stirs in his seat. She suspects he might have fallen asleep, off-loaded the burden of being attentive to her.

“He’ll be coming from the west,” she continues. “He’s maybe two blocks away.”

“OK, then,” Pig says, gathering himself up. The gun reappears in his hand.

She watches the corner. “There,” she says, as the young man comes into view.

Pig’s knuckles tighten on the door handle. “Wait a second,” she says. “Something is different.”

“What’s different,” he says, lifting up the mask to get a better look at her.