Vassa in the Night (10 page)

“Vassa Lisa Lowenstein,” I snap. “Actually. It's real enough for me.”

“So it is,” Babs says, and she definitely means it as an insult. “Step aside, please. There's the balance to tally before anyone can hope to rest.”

You mean in peace?
I think, but I don't say it. I walk over to the windows while Erg wriggles her way to my shoulder and Babs slumps down at the register. Pops the drawer and starts counting horribly slowly. Below me the parking lot glitters, inviting me to jump and break my neck. It's a better option than letting Babs win, isn't it? At least this way I'll be in control, choosing my own destiny instead of just being played. I inch closer to the door, and it spreads itself wide and waits. For an inanimate object it's a real gentleman. Maybe it will help me off with my jacket, too, before I splatter.

Something wavers in the corner of my eye and I glance over my shoulder. The hands are perched stiffly upright on the display of detergent that I smacked into last night, bouncing a little with barely repressed excitement. One of them curls its fingers and makes a sweeping motion to urge me toward the open door just a foot away.

I step back, blood rushing through my head like a sudden wind.

If the hands were so sure I was in for extermination, I know—I'm absolutely certain—they would want to do the honors themselves.

Babs is hunched over, licking her fingers and counting. She stops, snorts like a horse, and flicks her pallid eye at me. It seems to roll across the air, circle me, and then sweep back to its owner. Her upper lip hikes over yellow teeth and she lets out a stream of furious muttering, then starts the count again.

Erg nudges my nape and gives me a tiny bite. She couldn't actually have pulled this off, could she? But Babs's face is contorting with rage as she counts under her breath, almost spitting once she reaches the total, and I realize that I'm smiling so wide my face hurts. “Babs?” I say. “Everything okay? We've got no issues, right?”

“Issues,” Babs says. Suddenly she's staring hard. “Issues, Vassa? We may well have them, even if I'm not yet aware of their precise character.”

I pretend that I'm scratching my neck so I can curl my hand over Erg. “The balance? It's all good?”

“A nubbin of advice for you, impling. It's unwise to bring up terms like
good
or
bad, right
or
wrong,
in my store. As long as you're here the meaning of such words is entirely mine to determine, and you might not care for the definitions. But yes, the total is correct. A better sense of the numbers than I might have expected. Correct.” She delivers the last word like a whip crack. She manages a tortured smile. “I'm
pleased
with your performance.”

It takes all my self control not to burst out laughing in hysterical relief. Once we get out of here Erg is getting a giant hot fudge sundae all to herself. “Thanks, Babs! So if I have to stay here, where's my room?”

“Not yet,” Babs says, as if a place to sleep was located in time instead of space. “I have to … take care of…” She's completely lost interest in me, her gaze about as focused as spilled syrup now. She looks off but I can hear her stamping out a complicated rhythm on the floor. It has to be important so I do my best to memorize it, repeating it again and again in my brain.

I was right, the stamping was a signal: the store starts kneeling and the cemetery on the hill goes climbing up the sky as we drop. We touch down, the door's lip scraping the pavement, and Babs shambles lethargically out into the parking lot. I watch her teeter across the sparkling emptiness, the field of illumination from the picture window sweeping over her mangy moon of a scalp while the heads of her victims gawk down at her, probably wondering why they're stuck up there in the sky. Her trailing sleeves flap like the wings of a creature too sick to get airborne.

The motorcyclist stops and Babs goes up to him, wrapping his face in both her bony hands. It seriously looks like she's pinching his cheek, like she thinks he's some enormous muscle-bound toddler. Whatever she does must unbalance him, though, because his motorcycle starts tipping sideways, and then he's falling.

And falling. Impossibly slowly. How can a huge man on a huge slab of steel fall in that soporific way, as gently as a planet turning? It makes me a little dizzy and I look away for a moment, then when I raise my eyes again he's gone. Completely vanished, though it seems impossible that he could have righted himself and sped off in that flash of an instant. Babs stands alone in the parking lot, waving her arms up and down. The first fans of dawn outline her lilac bathrobe in shaggy glow. For a long moment she just kind of hovers there, looking at the crimson fissure opening along the base of the sky. She turns and starts her slow waddle back to me. It seems to take forever, but I wait for her and so does the store.

“There now,” Babs says, probably to herself, as she enters. It seems like she's forgotten all about me.

“That guy on the bike,” I say. “He's a security guard?”

Babs turns my way very gradually and looks at me as if I was a talking coatrack. “Yes,” she hisses and curls a smug smile. “Yes, that's right. Security guard.”

I already guessed that's not what he is, but I wanted to see her reaction. “So you sent him home? Because he's just like a night watchman?”

“Night watchman,” Babs muses. “A man who watches night by profession. Yes, imp, that's what he is. No need for him now that it's morning. He wouldn't know how to fix his pupil to a day anyway. Not trained for that. That requires advanced degrees.”

“I guess he has to sleep sometime,” I say.

Babs leers like she's just played some incredible practical joke and pushes past me. “Ah, impling. Such insight you have! It's downright scintillating. Here, now, you can sleep, too, until the night comes around again. In the back.”

I follow her. She moves so sluggishly that I have plenty of time to pick out food for Erg and me. I'm famished. By the time we get to the back of the store my arms balance a jumble of packages, mostly junk, but then that's what there is. There's another narrow door I somehow missed earlier wedged between two of the tall refrigerators on the back wall, and Babs shoves it open. I step through.

Inside it's more a closet than a room, with buckets and mops and a grayish cot. A thick stench evocative of pickled dust and mummified hedgehogs. At the back a screen made of old newspapers half-conceals a grubby sink and a toilet with a cracked seat. The main thing that attracts me about this room is that it has a real door. I'm hoping it can keep those hands out. I'm sick of never knowing where they are, or when they're watching me. “Thanks, Babs. This is terrific!”

“Good night,” Babs mutters even though it's morning, and then I'm finally alone. I sit on the cot and drop my packages, then grab the doorknob and jiggle it; the door seems to be securely latched, but of course there's no lock. Erg grabs the cord dangling from my hood and swings down onto my lap.

“You look sad,” she observes, sitting on my thigh. “I thought stumping her like that would make you
happy.
”

“I'm just thinking … there's no way to tell Chelsea, Erg. That I'm alive. She'll feel…”

“Oh, she's feeling
terrible,
” Erg agrees enthusiastically. “Miserable! She couldn't sleep at all. But, hey, Vassa? About the alive part?”

“You were amazing, dollface. You were completely great. I still have
no
idea how you were able to do that. I was so sure it was all over for me. Okay?” I'm pretty sure that's what she wants, to be slathered in my praise. It must make a nice change from always complimenting herself.

“Told you!” Erg crows. “Fast and faster! And oh my gosh, Felice's
face
when she realized all that money vanished from her
bra
—she looked like a plate of splatted spaghetti, Vassa! With meatball eyes! Tomin made fun of her for like an hour.”

Again there's that weird habit Erg has, talking as if she can watch people even when they're far away, but since she has a freakish tendency to be absolutely right I don't argue.

I'm still confused, though. “But what about the money that blew out the door? It was flying all over the parking lot, Erg. I still can't understand how you…”

“Well.” She looks away. “Maybe I had a little help. Which hardly detracts from my personal valor in this matter. So perhaps it would be tactful for you to change the subject?”

“Help?” I ask. It's baffling. Erg never speaks to anyone but me. “What are you talking about?”

“I see you snagged those lagoon-flavored toaster tarts! Good call! I'm eager to experience their briny goodness.”

“Erg…” But it's no use. She's clambered down onto the cot, already prodding at the cardboard.

“You have to open it for me, Vassa. May I please have my nutritious breakfast now?”

I give up on getting any information out of her and open the box and then the inner foil pack, taking one aqua-frosted tart for myself and setting another on the mattress. The pastry pops between my teeth like sugared seaweed. Erg is busy chomping away, and I lean against the wall and think about my dream. I know I should hate the motorcyclist—for chasing me back into BY's, for working for someone who obviously wants me dead. I know my dream was just a dream, and it would be completely inane for me to believe that I was actually talking to him and not just to some figment, some scattered detritus blasted up from my unconscious. I'm not a total idiot, and I really do know all that.

But I catch myself hoping that he was the one who helped Erg, and by extension me—that he wanted to look out for me. It would be hard to imagine a dumber hope, but there it is.

Chelsea once said that having a dad as callous, as self-obsessed, and as evasive as mine was has left me with some unconstructive ideas of what constitutes acceptable behavior. She said it warped my judgment. Kept me from realizing when people are just plain screwed up. So maybe that's all this is. I mean, the motorcyclist doesn't even talk, so it's unlikely that he has much emotional investment in my survival.

To be more precise, he doesn't talk while I'm awake. Which leads me to the next ludicrous hope that I observe in myself, in my sneaky reality-warping brain: that I can fall asleep soon and dream of him again. Continue our conversation.

I deserve a good smack in the face. Something to bring me to my senses.

 

INTERLUDE IN FUR

FIVE YEARS BEFORE

It wasn't working out
. That was clear to him, but he couldn't have said what
it
was exactly. He was still handsome enough to get his way much of the time, and if there was a noticeable erosion in the scope of what he could get away with it wasn't yet all that bad. He believed that he loved his wife—as much as she could reasonably expect, anyway. She wasn't always reasonable, though. She wasn't going to deal well with his plans when he told her about them, and if he weren't such a fundamentally honorable man, he would just disappear without telling her a damn thing.

As he stepped out of the old furrier's shop to the chiming of electric bells he congratulated himself on his courage and decency. The furrier, anticipating that his client might find things unpleasant at home, had offered to let him sleep on the sofa in back. He didn't need to see Iliana at all.

He'd just handed most of his savings over, in cash, to the furrier, pressing the bills into the man's wrinkled claw. It was a not entirely human-looking hand, and he'd noticed as well that the furrier's feet were on backward, toes flapping behind him in split shoes when he walked. He'd met a few such people before, in Zinaida's company—her family had connections with them stretching back to their days in the
old country
—and if they made him squeamish, well, he had to concede that they usually knew what they were doing.

Good people,
Zinaida had called these disquieting friends, with the sideways smile she reserved for speaking of them.
True gentry, persons of quality.
In that case he couldn't understand why they were so seedy and had such dubious personal hygiene and always lived in the most wretched corners of the city.
After the revolution they either didn't fit in, or they fit much too well, if you know what I'm saying.
He didn't. Smile and nod and try not to inhale.
Even some of the witches had to emigrate. It was my great-grandparents who helped my godmother Bea get out.
Whatever he was, the furrier was happy enough to pinch the stack of hundreds between his streaked brown nails, to curl one talon in a repetitive, scratching caress. Roland Lowenstein winced and reminded himself that money would be no use to him in his new life.

The cash was a deposit on services not yet rendered; it would pay for the preparations, for the well-oiled, supple, and glossy hide, for the
very special
thread that would be used to stitch it shut. For that kind of money he expected a luxuriant coat and sharp, pearlescent claws, clean fangs, and a healthy, lolling tongue.