Always (19 page)

I turned, as though going back to something I’d just seen. Once again, he slowed. I kept walking. He stopped. He put his phone away.

I ran at him.

After a split second, he ran, too. He ran with concentration, no backward glances, no tension in his shoulders, but I began to cut the distance. Fifty yards. Forty. My lips skinned back in a grin. Thirty. Soon we’d find out what was going on. Twenty. Then we hit a hill. In five seconds I was breathless and in fifteen he was gone.

It took me half an hour to get back to the hotel. No one followed me. I wasn’t sure what I would do if they had. I thought of the laptop as I’d left it: Kick’s smile as brilliant as burning magnesium.
I’ll get it back for you,
I’d said. No one could ever give her that back.

THE CONCIERGE,
whose name was Benjamin, was African-American, which surprised me, and I realized what had seemed so unreal about the crowds by the waterfront, and nearly everyone I had seen in Seattle so far: they had been ninety-five percent white, with a handful of Asians and a sprinkling of Hispanics and Native Americans. Nothing like Atlanta, where more than half the population was black.

I introduced myself. He smiled—he had a tiny birthmark just to the left of center on his bottom lip—said he knew who I was, and asked how he could help me this morning.

I didn’t like the idea of anyone knowing my name.

“I’d like to arrange for the delivery of a large floral bouquet, today. Special delivery, if necessary.”

“Certainly.”

“Whatever’s in season will be fine.”

“A particular occasion?”

“A thank-you.”

“Formal or informal?”

“Formal. And a note, to read, My apologies once again for the disturbance. Thank you for your kindness. Best wishes, Aud Torvingen.”

“Return address?”

“No.” And that was that.

I DELETED
the search results and Kuiper’s picture flicked out. I read Rusen’s file for five minutes, then closed it. I hadn’t even been able to understand that Seattle was almost wholly white. There was absolutely no point scanning a document in the hope of spotting an anomaly. I simply didn’t know the city well enough. I shouldn’t have come. In Atlanta, I knew law enforcement and criminals, journalists and politicians; I understood the lines running between money and power. Here, I knew nobody; nobody knew me.

Perhaps I could do something about that.

BENJAMIN LOOKED UP.
"Ms. Torvingen. More flowers?”

“No. Something else.” He smiled, to indicate that he was sure that whatever it was, it was within his capabilities. I wondered where concierges went to school to learn that responsive, intelligent attentiveness. “This is my first visit to Seattle and I don’t know a soul. I was hoping you might help me overcome that.”

“Of course.” Face still open, still attentive, but eyes speculative. “Perhaps you could be more specific.”

“This evening I’d like to relax privately here at the hotel in the company of someone attractive and discreet.”

“Attractive and discreet. Certainly.” I could have been asking to rent a car. “Should your companion have any specific attributes?”

I pondered. “I require a certain level of maturity. A grown-up.” Someone who paid attention to the world.

He nodded courteously. “What time would it be convenient for him— or her?—to visit?”

It was about two-thirty. “I’d like her to be here as soon as possible.”

“Very good. And for how long would you like the pleasure of her company? ”

How does one time such things? “Perhaps she should be prepared to devote the entire afternoon and evening.”

“I’ll make arrangements and fax them to your suite.”

WHEN I GOT
back to my suite, paper was churning silently from the fax machine:
Four-hour sessions max. available, $1,100 per. Poss. negot. consecutive sess. at time of payment—cash preferred, credit card accepted. Meeting scheduled 4:30 pm.

One hour and fifty minutes from now.

I turned my laptop on again, and opened the e-mail from Luz.

I just finished a book by Lloyd Alexander have you read any? They’re okay but not as good as Narnia I borrowed them from my friend Natalie.

Had she mentioned Natalie before?

Natalie says they’re for kids but I might like them, she’s also lent me one called Eragon that she says is excellent. I read the first page but then Aba told me to turn the light out and not read anymore tonight so I’m writing to you instead.

Perhaps I should write to Adeline about the need to explain the spirit as well as the letter of the law when making suggestions to Luz. Adeline still thought of the computer as a complicated typewriter. It wouldn’t occur to her that with the lights off, Luz could send e-mail, surf the Web, work on her LiveJournal, add to her Sims family. It was doubtful that she knew Luz and I talked to each in any other way than the stiff little thank-you notes Adeline made her write, fountain pen on lined paper—
Thank you very much for paying for my new dresser and desk. They are mission style, stained medium oak, and will be very useful when I do my homework
—and then included with the progress report she dutifully sent every month, a list of expenses, church events, and health or educational matters. The handwritten notes were grammatically perfect. I suspected Luz wrote a rough draft and Adeline then went over any mistakes and had Luz copy it out in her best hand. Perhaps that’s something I should be doing with these e-mails.

But it was Adeline’s role to correct Luz’s grammar and tend to her manners, not mine.

But what did that mean, exactly?

IN MY
mother’s suite, the afternoon sun fell against the eastern corner of the sitting room and spilled over the carpet and up the legs of the coffee table. It flashed on her wedding ring, white and yellow gold, geometric Italian design, and the enameled Norwegian flag pin in her lapel. She was talking about her day: meetings at Microsoft, a tour of the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, and an honorary marshal spot in the Syttende Mai independence day parade. She saw me looking at the flag. “I forgot to take it off,” she said, and pulled it casually from the silk. She dropped it on the table and cradled her coffee, and continued her account of all the Americans celebrating their Norwegian heritage, eating
polse
and ice cream, the children wearing bright red
bunad,
the Sons of Norway with their heavy banners and the fiddlers dancing behind them. Every now and again she would pause, and wait for me to add something, and when I didn’t, she would go on.

Every now and again, too, she tilted her head. She knew I’d come to talk to her about something.

Help me,
I wanted to say.
Talk to me about how it was. Tell me about family.

“. . . realize that today is short notice, but perhaps tomorrow? If you’re well enough.”

Dinner. “Yes, tomorrow would be fine. Thank you.”

“And your friend, would he like to come?”

“I’ll ask him.” It was quarter to four. I had to get cash. “Yes, probably.”

She put her cup down, smoothed her dress. “Good. Tomorrow it is, then. Although if you don’t have plans for tonight . . . ?”

“I have plans.”

She nodded, and we stood, and I was struck by how she moved. She wore a dress—not a suit, not a gown, but a dress—and she was happy. She was tired and a little tense, but underneath it all she was at home with herself in a way I’d never thought I’d see. When I was a child, I had dreamt of how she might be in a perfect world—the grin, the hug, the surprise trip to the zoo, the maternal mysterious knowledge of my innermost secret desire for a ham sandwich or chocolate biscuit—but I’d never imagined this lightness, a woman who finally had some air folded into her mix, who had risen like a fairy cake.

“I’m . . .” But there wasn’t time. “Thank you. I’m happy for you. It’s good to see you.”

She laid her hand on my upper arm briefly—her fingertips touched the hidden scar. “Audhumla.” The giant cow from the beginning of the world, who was made of frost, and licked the frost from stones. I had forgotten. She had first called me that when I was five, and she had found me sucking the creamy ice that had risen from a milk bottle left on the doorstep at dawn and frozen. Then she had laughed. Now she didn’t.

ROOM SERVICE
had called and left the champagne. I counted out eleven one-hundred -dollar bills, and then again, and left the two slight stacks next to each other on the sideboard. I stowed the rest in the drawer beneath the TV, with the remote. Now I had half an hour to shower, and arrange the furniture and lighting. The welcoming ambience wasn’t strictly necessary, and might not make any difference to the end result, but I wished to acknowledge that although my companion might be bought and paid for, she was a human being. It seemed only polite.

AT 4 : 3 2 ,
there was a confident knock on my door.

“I’m Isabella,” she said, in a voice like myrrh, and I let her in.

She took it all in—the chilling champagne and two glasses, my bare feet and still-damp hair, the lack of underwear beneath silk shirt and trousers, the closed inner drapes in the sitting room and the bedroom door standing ajar and showing a hint of shadow and candlelight—in one sweeping glance, and said, “Thank you,” when I offered to take her wrap. It slid from her bare shoulders into my hands like an offering. Her skin smelled of heat and spice. I carried the light wrap to the closet, and took my time hanging it.

The cash was gone when I returned, both piles.

She looked out over the city while I poured the champagne, and when I sat on the sofa, she sat at my feet as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and laid her hand on my thigh.

“Aud,” she said, “it is very good to meet you,” and I wanted to believe her. Her eyes were sunlit honey. Summer eyes. Nothing to do with frost or snow or death.

“It’s very good to meet you, Isabella,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because her hand had started to stroke my thigh, almost absentmindedly, and she was looking at me as though I were her queen.

“Aud, it’s an unusual name.”

“Yes.”

“Are you visiting from another country?”

It felt like it.

“Aud. Am I pronouncing it right?”

“Yes. It’s Norwegian, after Aud the Deepminded. She founded Iceland.”

“Iceland,” she said. “I hear it’s a beautiful country. Contradictory. Ice and glaciers and molten lava. And hot springs.”

And so controlling of its citizens: only certain things on television, certain names legally allowed.

“You have such lovely muscle here, such strength.” She stroked down, paused thoughtfully, stroked up, ending just a fraction higher than she’d started. Her cheekbones shimmered, as though gilded. Through the thin silk of my trousers her hand was warm and alive. “Do you like to work out?”

“Um?”

“You work out?”

“Yes.”

She propped her cheek on her fist and went on stroking. “Swimming? Or perhaps some other kind of sports.” She knelt like a handmaid, eyes never leaving mine, waiting for a signal. “Tell me what kind of sports you like.”

“Competitive.” I tried to organize my thoughts but she was calling heat from me as effortlessly as flame from a lamp, and my mind was drowning.

She bent and pushed off her shoes—her scalp was white and clean, her hair smelled of attar of roses—then leaned across me for the champagne. Her breasts plumped warmly on my legs for a moment and then she topped up my glass. I should be doing that. I should be doing all sorts of things. But all I could focus on was her hand.

“Your champagne,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s delicious, a very good choice. But this evening is for you. I’m here to make you happy.”

She rested her palm, very gently, on my belly. If I let her, she could make me very happy. All she had to do was turn her hand and her fingers would brush between my legs. I took her wrist, and I meant to put her hand away, to say something, to explain, but I couldn’t help it, I turned it palm up and leaned forward and kissed it.

She arched, until her throat was inches from my mouth. “Tell me what you want,” she said, and I watched myself take her head in my hands and kiss her. I hadn’t meant to, but then I found her mouth hot and sliding under mine and I couldn’t stop. I folded down next to her and, hands still in her hair, eased her flat on the carpet and knelt over her. She reached for my leg and tugged, gently, insistently, until I lifted it, and straddled her. Her dress rode up over smooth, golden legs and a tight curving belly. She was small in my arms, and her heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s.

She reached up and brushed my left nipple through the silk very lightly with the back of her hand, and I groaned. She blinked at me, very slowly, and touched my top button, and undid it, and touched the next one, and unfastened that, and the next, and I didn’t stop her, and she freed my left breast and held her palm beneath it, not touching, until I lowered my breast to it; and she drew her hand down another inch. Again I bent, until my breast was three inches from her mouth. She moved her hand. Her breath was feathery, her lips red.

“Give it to me,” she said, “make me take it,” and opened her mouth.

I wanted to stop. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make her take my whole breast in her mouth and slide off my trousers and straddle her naked belly, hot and soft.

Someone knocked on the door. She went very still beneath me.

“Aud, it’s me.” Dornan.

I couldn’t think. I felt dazed, too hot and swollen for my clothes.

“Aud?” He knocked again.

I sat back on my heels and took a ragged breath, and then another. I fastened a couple of buttons. Isabella closed her mouth and ran her hands through her hair. I breathed some more and stood.