The Insides (20 page)

“It’s not regrettable to kill people,” she says. “It is wrong.”

Pig looks like he might spit. “Listen to you,” he says.

“It shouldn’t be so surprising a thing,” Maja says, “to hear me say this. It is wrong to kill people. As a—how did you put it?—as a
moral code
, it is neither elaborate nor unusual. It is, ultimately, very simple.”

“Still though,” Pig says. “I bet it’s
real
nice, to be in possession of a moral code that allows you to feel bad when somebody dies but that’s still flexible enough that you can pal around with killers when there’s enough money involved.”

Maja composes a line of thought in her head, and then gives one slow, deliberate blink, and begins to speak, as calmly as though she were reading from a document. “You have—or, rather, your
father
has—employed me to find and retrieve something for you. That is all. Any moral judgments I make regarding the activities that you should undertake
in the process fall outside of the scope of any obligations concerning my employment. I may choose to either issue these judgments or withhold them. Whether the motivating forces behind my moral code appear hypocritical to you is of no concern whatsoever, from a contractual perspective. However. If, for reasons that I could not possibly begin to fathom, it has become important to you that we redefine my contractual obligations in a manner that requires me to present the appearance of moral consistency, or to offer you a regular opportunity for moral absolution, then please, by all means, get on the phone to your father and convey this to him, promptly, so that, from there, we can discuss the consequent adjustment to my fee. I ask only that you be alert to two facts: one, that this adjustment will be substantial, and two, that should your father and I fail to reach an agreement, I will not hesitate to walk away from this job.”

Pig regards her.

She reaches behind her without looking and lifts the phone handset, offers it out toward him.

“Go ahead,” she says.

At this, he cracks a smile.

“You know what, Finder, you’re hard-core,” he says, shaking his head infinitesimally. “But you’re all right. Within the, uh,
the scope of the contractual obligations of your employment
, you’re all right. If I may say so.”

“You may say so,” Maja says, after a moment.

“OK, good,” Pig says. “I’m saying so.”

She hangs up the phone.

The police take Ollie in until morning. They put her in a grubby room where two separate detectives bring her two separate paper cups of equally bad coffee and ask her essentially the same set of questions. They move her to a cubicle where she answers more questions from a guy who tries to use his computer to make a face of the suspect. Were his eyes closer together or further apart? Did he have more of a square chin or more of a rounded chin? Her answers all effectively amount to: It was dark. I couldn’t see. I don’t know.

She doesn’t talk to anyone about the knife, in its box, inside her bag.

At some point they give her a brochure from the Witness Aid Services Unit and leave her in a plastic seat in a hallway. She flips the brochure open, stares at its information without exactly reading it. Counseling, support groups, shelters, orders of protection. She has no idea which of these she might need. The only thing she can really think of that she needs for sure is sleep. No one’s attending to her but
no one’s told her she can leave, either. She curls up as best she can in the hard shell of the chair, holds her messenger bag against her belly, and falls in and out of fitful dreams.

When she wakes up there’s like thirty notifications on her phone. Texts, e-mails, Facebook messages. She blinks at them groggily, tries to untangle what’s happening. It seems that the murders at Carnage made the papers: front page of the
Post
, first page of the Metro section in the
Times
. Everybody wants to know where she is, whether she’s OK. Messages from Victor, messages from Jon, messages from Carnage people she didn’t even realize had her phone number: random cooks, servers, even one of the dishwashers. There’s a message from Ulysses: S
AW WHAT HAPPENED
. W
HAT THE FUCK
. C
HECKING TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE SAFE
. This followed by another one: I
’M COMING DOWN
. W
HERE ARE YOU?

There’s nothing from Donald. Not that she expected anything: it’s been a year since he’s been in touch. To the best of her knowledge he doesn’t even look at her Facebook page so he might not be seeing what people are posting there. Unless some mutual acquaintance of theirs forwarded him the
Times
article, he might not even know. But still. She remembers the early conversations they’d had in the first years of their relationship, the way he could calm her down, just using words like they were their own form of magic. She remembers the way he could seem to reach into her skull and help her to untangle the snarled emotions she’d jammed away in there. She could use that deftness today. She misses it, even though she tries not to, even though she works hard to forget that it ever was a thing.

There is also no word from Guychardson. She looks at the last text she sent him. Still unanswered. She gets an awful feeling in her gut.

She begins the process of replying to everyone. She texts Victor back first, just the words I
’M
OK. W
ITH THE COPS
. She texts Ulysses with the precinct name. She texts Jon, asks him to let everybody else in the Carnage network know that she’s alive, just so she doesn’t have to deal with reaching out to every last person. She thinks for a second and then sends Jon another text: S
ORRY ABOUT
A
NGEL
. It feels like such a worthless thing to say, but you have to say something. He replies with like a million questions, which are basically the same questions that the cops asked, and for now she just ignores them all.

One of the detectives she talked to earlier comes down the hallway. “Hey,” he says, “you’re up.”

“Listen,” she blurts at him. “This guy? The—what, the suspect? The shooter? I think he might also have shot somebody else. Maybe Sunday night, late. A guy, Haitian guy. My friend. Guychardson.”

A phone call is made. A third detective gets called in; she ends up back in the same grubby interview room.

“Wait a second,” she says, before he can begin in on the questions. “I just need to make sure of what’s happening. I just need to ask—is he dead?” She can hear her voice begin to get unhinged, but she keeps speaking. “You’re a homicide cop, like the others, but you’re not the
same
cop, that means, I mean, that has to mean he’s dead, doesn’t it? Just tell me. Fucking tell me.”

The third detective looks away, seems to take a moment
to summon something from some reserve, and then turns back to her. “Yes,” he says, “your friend was shot and killed early Monday morning outside of his apartment, in Brooklyn.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Ollie. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

And right there at the table, she cries. Once she starts it feels like she might not be able to stop. The cop looks down at his own hands in a practiced way while waiting for her to finish; after what seems like a long time he gets up and heads out, eventually returning with a box of tissues that he found somewhere. She clutches it, turns it in her hands, as though it were a piece that had fallen out of her life. As though if she revolved it in just the right way she could snap it back into its original position, return it to its place in the original configuration, and then the whole thing would miraculously start working again, as though nothing had ever happened, and everything would be OK.

Instead she’s in the police station for two more hours of questioning. By the time they’re done with her she feels completely hollowed out. She rises from the chair, rubs her temples, rolls her shoulders. Checks her phone. Loads more messages from everyone, but there’s one specific one she’s hoping for, and she finds it. It’s Ulysses again: I
N THE LOBBY
. C
OME FIND ME
.

And she walks through a set of doors and there he is. She still doesn’t know exactly how she’d describe the nature of their relationship but right at this moment she’s simply grateful to have someone in her life who is large, solid,
someone who can serve, literally, as support. She walks into him the way one would walk into a wall. He manages to turn it into something that might pass for an embrace by getting his arms up and around her.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he says.

She clenches her eyes shut.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he says again, lower, murmuring it into her ear. She doesn’t feel safe. She pushes into him harder, as though the way to safety might somehow involve moving
through
him, breaching the boundary that keeps them apart and distinct, winding up inside one another.

They stand like this for a minute, pressed together, half-embraced, until finally Ulysses says, “Um, cops kind of freak me out. Do you want to get out of here?”

Yes. Yes she does.

“Do you want to go home?” Ulysses asks her, once she’s situated in the front of his big old Buick.

“I don’t know,” she says. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m safe. That guy’s still out there, still here, in the city somewhere.”

“You think he might be after you? You specifically? People online are saying botched robbery—”

“Probably it is, yeah. But I don’t think it’s just, like, a
random
robbery. This guy wasn’t just trying to grab cash from the till. He was after something specific. And the fucked up thing is that I have it.”

“You have what?”

“The thing the guy was after.”

“Yeah, I get it, but what
is
it?”

“It’s a knife.”

“A knife? You think this guy shot Angel over a
knife
?”

“Angel and Guychardson.”

“Wait: Guychardson?”

“You know him. Haitian guy?”

“Short?”

“Yeah.”

“That guy got shot?”

“He’s dead.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. Maybe some other dudes, too; I’m not totally sure.”

“Over a knife
?”

“I think so. It’s a special knife, I think.”

“What’s so special about it?”

Ollie thinks about this for a minute. How to explain it. Ulysses doesn’t really believe in magic. She remembers exactly when she told him that she was a practitioner: a warm night, last summer, when she was living with him at his homestead. The two of them had gone through half a box of wine and she had begun to feel big confessional feelings; she had admitted that part of how she’d captured his eye in the first place was by committing a tiny act of sorcery. It had felt incredibly shameful, to say it out loud—to essentially admit that she had manipulated him, against his will, without his consent—but he’d just snorted, as though she’d told him that she’d first chosen him because she thought they had compatible zodiac signs. After that she didn’t bring it up much with him. And yet she’s not sure she has any better explanation.

“It’s magic,” she says.

Ulysses just lets that hang there.

“Look,” Ollie says, “You don’t have to believe that it’s magic. Just—just think of it as something that’s like
super valuable
. What’s the most valuable thing you can think of?”

“Me personally?” says Ulysses.

“You personally.”

Without missing a beat, Ulysses responds, “A John Deere 5M series utility tractor.”

“OK, cool,” Ollie says. “So just imagine this knife as a very tiny, very valuable tractor with unique properties.”

“Magic tractor,” Ulysses says, trying out the idea.

“Yes,” Ollie says.

“Unique properties.”

“Special powers,” Ollie says.

“So what can it do?”

At this, Ollie frowns, because she still isn’t exactly sure. “It can cut through space and time,” she offers, finally.

Ulysses frowns back in return. “What does that mean?”

“I have no fucking idea. But it’s what everyone keeps saying.”

“OK,” Ulysses says, after a minute. “You wanted a strategy. Here’s a strategy: I drive you to the river, you throw the Goddamn thing in there, and we’re done with it.”

“No,” Ollie says.

“Why
not
?”

“Guychardson thought that it was valuable. He thought it was valuable enough to risk his
life
over.”

“Sure, but—he’s fucking
dead
now.”

“Right, but that doesn’t mean he was
wrong
. And if
this thing is so important that people are willing to kill over it, it just seems like maybe we should hang onto it until we know more.”

Ulysses considers this. “So, all right, this guy, this killer, you think he knows where you live? You think he might show up at your place?”

“Maybe.” She thinks. Fear begins to crawl over her as she adds up what she knows. “Guychardson got shot outside of his apartment, so this guy knew where Guychardson lived. That could mean that he has access to the Carnage personnel records or something. Definitely fucking possible.”

“OK, so—let’s get you way the hell away.”

“Yeah,” Ollie says. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

“How ’bout my place?”

She thinks about Ulysses’s homestead, out in the middle of Goddamn nowhere, nothing if not way the hell away. She could go. There’s nothing really stopping her: she’s learned from her phone that Carnage is closed for the time being; no one seems exactly sure when it’s going to reopen but probably not for another couple of days at least. So she could go. A couple of days spent hiding out might be enough time to make a long-term plan. A couple of days might be enough time for the cops to catch the guy. She tries very hard to believe in the probability of that outcome.

“Yeah,” she says. “Let’s do that.”

“You want to swing by your place, grab some clothes or something? A toothbrush?”

“Fuck it,” Ollie says. “I can get that stuff on the road. I think it’s safer just to go.”

Safer just to go: this causes Victor’s name to pop up, an
alert in her mind. If the apartment’s not safe, then he’s not safe.