Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (23 page)

“Cool. That’s fucking great, man. I got to get a new job. Right now I’m working for this Chink fuck who’s got this online porn site. At first I thought, hey, cool, he pays fuck-all but still the greatest job ever, right? But mother of fucking God, man. This shit he does, it is
fucked up
. This shoot they were doing yesterday, you shoulda seen it –”
   I definitely did not want to know a single thing about pornography so extreme that even Arwin found it disturbing. “Listen,” I said quickly, “you seen Zoltan or Zorana?”
   “Actually, yeah,” he said. “Zoltan called me like an hour ago. Asking about you and if I had your phone number. He sounded, I dunno, weird. I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk to him, so I told him I just had your email. He didn’t even want that.”
   I sat for a second, trying to make sense out of what I had just heard. Zoltan had called Arwin to ask about me. Why would Zoltan want to get in touch with me?
   “Sounded weird how?” I asked.
   “I dunno. Just like something had gone wrong.”
For a bad moment I wondered if Zoltan somehow knew I had gone to the FBI. But he couldn’t. No one knew but me, Talena, and Agent Turner herself. It had to be just coincidence that he was asking about me now.
   There had been that conversation in Albania, when Zoltan and Zorana had pumped me for information on living in California, and I had told them they could call me if anything went wrong. That could explain why they were trying to find me. If so, it was perfect. I would meet them, give them advice on whatever their problem was, maybe even find out exactly where they were living, and then I would go to Agent Turner and topple the first domino in a chain that hopefully led from her office all the way to the Hague and the international war crimes tribunal.
   “Do you have his number?” I asked.
   “No. I think he called from a pay phone.”
   “All right,” I said. “If he calls again, give him my cell number, and tell him I’ll be happy to meet him and help him out if he’s having any trouble.”
   “Really? Okay, you want to play nice with those two crazies, that’s your problem. You want to meet for a beer tomorrow? Noc Noc is good, that place rocks. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about the freaky Oksana.”
   “I can’t wait,” I said, amused. “Sounds good. See you then.”

The number 19 bus took me to the corner of 16th Street and Rhode Island. From there I walked a steep seven blocks to our house. I could have waited for another bus, but after six hours staring at a computer screen while performing intense mental abstractions, any physical strain was refreshing. I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings. My thoughts alternated between work problems and how I might convince Arwin to give up his password.
   Talena had just gotten home, was shrugging off her jacket as I walked in.
   “Hi, honey, I’m home, what’s for dinner?” I mock-demanded. I swung the door shut behind me, walked up to her, and kissed her hello. I did not notice that the door did not thunk into place.
   “I was just wondering that,” she said. “We could make fajitas, or –””
   She stiffened and looked over my shoulder. I released her and turned around, perplexed. Then I gasped with surprise and horror.

Zoltan and Zorana stood in the doorway.
   “Paul,” Zoltan said, as Zorana closed the door behind them. “So good to see you.”
   “Uh,” I said. Play it cool. “Yeah. Hi. Good to see you too.” I approached his outstretched hand and reached to shake it. “How did you find out –”
   But I never finished asking him how he found where I lived, because he punched me in the stomach so hard that I blacked out for a moment.

It was a perfect punch, just what he had taught me in Sinisa’s basement boxing gym, a low right cross, powered from the hips, connecting just under my ribcage and exploding into my solar plexus. When I came to I was curled up on the floor, clutching my gut and retching for breath. He had knocked the wind out of me. I hurt so badly my first coherent thought was that he had damaged some organ and I must be bleeding internally. All strength had drained from my limbs. I felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut. I looked up, still gasping ineffectually like a landed fish, still not really understanding what was going on. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Talena lookd down at me, shocked, her mouth open, and her hands fluttered ineffectually in front of her as Zorana, behind her, grabbed Talena’s long dark hair and yanked. Talena’s head flew back and hit the wall with a sickening crack. As she fought for balance Zoltan hit her in the gut with a textbook left hook and Talena folded over gracefully, like it was deliberate, some sort of gymnastics move, and fell near me on the floor. I tried to scramble over on top of her, to shield her body with mine, but I couldn’t breathe, I was too weak to move fast, and before I made it to her Zorana stepped behind me and unleashed a perfect kick into my testicles. The pain was incredible, brain-erasing, a nuclear detonation. It reduced me to an animal. For a moment I stopped thinking about Talena. I no longer knew that Talena was in the room. I no longer knew where or maybe even who I was. All I knew was that I was in unbelievable agony and I couldn’t breathe.
   By the time I finally forced oxygen back into my wheezing, pain-wracked body, my wrists had been handcuffed behind my back and a filthy dishrag had been stuffed into my mouth and tied around my head. From where I lay on the floor I could see that Talena too had been cuffed and gagged. Blood seeped down the side of her head and onto her right ear and the side of her face, and she coughed and choked against her gag. It was almost unbearable, watching her like that, unable to do anything to help her. I still didn’t really comprehend what was going on, it had all happened too suddenly, but when I came to enough of my senses to understand that Talena was badly hurt and in terrible danger, that hurt worse than any physical pain I could possibly suffer.
   Zoltan barked something in Serbian and then he was behind me, lifting me up by the arms. I scrambled to get to my feet before he dislocated both of my shoulders. He marched me over into the kitchen, spun one of the wooden chairs around, and sat me down, threading the back of the chair between my back and my cuffed arms. My shoulders immediately began to ache. Zorana, after closing all the curtains, forced Talena onto a chair next to me. Zoltan shoved her chair next to mine so we sat side by side, our backs to the kitchen table. Then he took another chair and sat in front of us. There wasn’t much room and his knees almost touched mine.
   “From the beginning I wanted to kill you,” he said. “From the beginning.”
   I tried to talk through my gag, to ask him what was going on, to feign indignation, but the noises that came out were incoherent and so quiet I don’t know if he heard anything at all. I was so weak and nauseous with pain that I don’t think he would have understood me even without the gag. My lungs and shoulders ached, my stomach where he had hit me felt like it was on fire, and worst of all a huge, cold, sickening knot of agony had formed deep inside my gut and seemed to tighten with every breath. I breathed as fast and shallowly as I could and told myself not to throw up, whatever happened, or with this gag on I might easily suffocate myself.
   “We were so good to you,” Zorana said. She sounded disappointed, like she was scolding a wayward child. “We helped your little friend Saskia, we paid you well, we fed you, we sheltered you, we drank beer with you. I thought we were friends, Paul. And now you go to the FBI, you try to have us arrested? You betrayed us. There is nothing worse than a person who betrays his friends. Nothing worse.”
   I winced with understanding. How could they know? How could they possibly know we had gone to the FBI?
   “You deserve everything we do to you,” Zorana concluded.

 Zoltan reached into his jacket and his hand came out holding a combat knife, its blade at least six inches long. I moaned involuntarily with fear.
   “You will keep your voice quiet,” Zoltan advised me, “or your girlfriend, I will cut her throat like a pig.” He reached out and pulled the gag from my mouth down to my neck.
   “You understand me?” he asked.
   “Yes,” I managed. “Yes. I understand. Please don’t, please, please I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything you want.”
   My whimpering pleas were heartfelt, but they were also very deliberate. I was terrified, I was in shock and agony, but one tiny corner of my mind was cool and calm and analytic, racing to calculate how I might possibly improve our odds of survival. Stoke Zoltan’s vanity, accelerate his power trip, seem as frightened and harmless and beneath contempt as possible. If there was any chance of us getting out of this alive, it lay in him believing we would be too terrified to ever so much as speak his name again.
   “Of course you will,” he said. “Who else did you tell?”
   “No one,” I said. “I swear.” For a moment I considered denying that we had ever gone to the FBI, but there was no point, I couldn’t imagine how he knew but given that he did his proof was probably pretty decisive, and besides the idea was to show him that he had already broken my will completely, lying to him would indicate resistance. “We just went to the FBI. I knew an agent there. I know an agent. We just went to her. No one else, they don’t know anything. Not even Saskia, we didn’t tell her.”
   “You fucking liar,” Zoltan said. “Who else did you tell?”
   “No one!” I said desperately. “No one else! Oh, god, no, no,
don’t!
” as he rose and stood over Talena with the knife.
   “Be quiet or her blood will fall like fucking rain,” he said to me.

Over his shoulder, to Zorana, he said something in Serbian. Zorana came over took his place on the folding chair in front of me. She watched me very carefully, fascinated, as if I was a particularly good television program, while Zoltan roughly pulled Talena’s T-shirt up over her head, prompting a grunt of pain from her, and cut her bra off.
   “Please no,” I breathed. “Please, we didn’t tell anyone else. I’m telling the truth. Please.”
   Zoltan dragged Talena up from the chair with a hand in her hair, turned her around, bent her over the table, undid her jeans, which took a little while, and pulled her jeans and underwear down below her knees. Talena was grunting through her gag and shivering and her eyes were closed. The wet blood on the side of her head smeared the pale wood of our kitchen table. I decided that if I got out of this room alive then some day Zoltan would die at my hands. Some day very soon.
   “No. Zoltan. No. Please.” I begged, keeping the fury out of my voice with an effort. “Please don’t. Please no. Please no.”
   “Tell me everything. Tell me who else knows.”
   “No one knows!” I was almost sobbing with rage and fear. “We didn’t tell anyone! No one else!”
   “How did you find out?”
   “She was looking at a web site. The war tribunal. Your picture was there.”
   “The tribunal,” Zorana said. “I knew it.”
   “We know you told others,” Zoltan said. “Tell me who else and I’ll let her live.”
   “No one! There wasn’t anyone else! We went to the fucking FBI! Why would we tell anyone else after that?” My voice was hoarse.
   Zoltan nodded, satisfied, and stood back from Talena. “Get up,” he told her. “Sit.”
   After a moment she did, awkwardly. He approached her again, this time holding the knife. I could tell he intended to use it on her.
   “Not her,” I gasped, “no, Zoltan, not her, me, not her, don’t, don’t –”
   Zoltan spoke a few Serbian words that prompted Zorana to punch me in the stomach again. She was sitting down and couldn’t punch as hard as Zoltan, but the pain erupted anew, even worse this time, like pouring gasoline on a fire. It hurt so much that the world blurred and for a moment I thought I might pass out, I felt vaguely dissociated from my body, as if I was observing rather than experiencing its suffering, watching myself writhe in agony, choke and gasp and make low dying noises. Then the moment passed and I was back inside my skin, desperately trying not to throw up.
   “She’s pretty,” Zoltan said, staring at Talena’s nakedness. “Isn’t she pretty.” He lowered the tip of his knife to her skin, hard enough to dimple her skin but not hard enough to cut her, and began to trace it up and down the contours of her body. Talena shuddered. I snarled like an animal but it made the knot of agony worse and I began to choke and whimper again as Zorana laughed at me. Tears began to leak from Talena’s eyes, mixing with the blood on one side of her face, but her body stayed ramrod straight.
   “It would almost be worth it, to keep her, finish her,” Zoltan said. He was talking to Zorana. “Finish both of them. It would be so good.”
   “No,” Zorana said sharply. “It’s not worth it. They’re not worth America.”
   “America.” Zoltan tasted the word. He thought about it a moment. “No,” he said decisively. “Not worth America.”

He turned to me. “You will never speak of us again. Not to the police, not even to Arwin or Sinisa, not to anyone. You will never even think of us. If the police or FBI ever asks, you will tell them we stayed in Belize. Or we will find you. We have friends. We have such friends. You will never escape. We will find you. I think you know what we will do to you then, don’t you? You know what will happen to you, and your pretty girlfriend, and your little friend Saskia?” He lightly trailed a figure of eight around Talena’s nipples with the point of his knife. “I hope you do speak of us again. But you won’t. I know. I see it in your eyes. Am I right?”
   “Yes,” I said. Maybe we were going to live. Unless he was just teasing us. “Yes. We’ll never say anything to anyone about you. Please don’t hurt her. We’ll never say anything. Nothing ever. Please don’t hurt her, please,
please
.” I somehow knew from his grin and his body language that he was still going to use the knife. I started to cry.
   Zoltan pulled Talena’s gag down. “And you as well? You will say nothing?”
   Talena took a breath. “I will say nothing,” she said, her voice trembling.
   “Good,” Zoltan said. “Now here is something to remember your promises with.” He turned to me. “Every time you see her naked, from now on, you will think of me. You will remember.”

Then he cut Talena, he drew a short bloody vertical line about three inches long between her breasts, cutting her right down to her breastbone. Talena shook but didn’t make a sound. I opened my mouth to cry out and Zorana lifted her right leg up and jammed her foot into my crotch, grinding her heel into me. My scream turned into a tortured groan. I had not known it was possible to hurt so much. When she pulled her leg back I couldn’t hold back the nausea any longer, I began to throw up, I tried to lean over but all I could do was bend my head and vomit onto my shirt and my lap.
   “It will scar, I think,” Zoltan said, inspecting his work clinically.

Blood flowed down Talena’s quivering belly, began to pool in her pubic hair.
  
You will die
, I told him silently, a supernova of wrath blotting out most of my pain for a single blessed moment.
I will see you dead. That’s a promise
.

“Do not take her to hospital,” he said to me. “They will ask questions. If you take her to hospital, we will find out.”

I didn’t say anything. I stared at the floor. I didn’t dare look at him.

Zoltan looked at Zorana and said “Enough. It is enough.”
   Zorana smiled at him and stood. She reached into her pocket and put something metal next to the sink. “Handcuff keys,” she said brightly, like she was giving us a Christmas gift. “Goodbye, Paul.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead. Then she followed Zoltan outside, and the door slammed, and we were alone in our home, alone and wounded but alive.
* * *
   “Maybe we should go to the hospital,” I whispered
   “No,” she whispered back. “No. It’s not worth it. I’ll be fine. I think it’s clotted over already. You’re more hurt than I am.”
   We had no reason to whisper. The door was locked, Zoltan and Zorana was long gone. But we felt a long, long way from safe and sound. Not here, where we had been attacked. Not in what had been our home, but didn’t feel like a home any more, and I thought maybe never would again.

It had taken us a long time to free ourselves. We had awkwardly, painfully contorted ourselves, standing back to back, until Talena was able to insert the key into my handcuffs and free me. My hands were shaking so much it took me five attempts before I could do the same for her. We held each other, then, for a long time, we made to our couch and fell on it and held each other and wept, before we cleaned up as best we could.

We didn’t call the police. Neither of us even suggested it as a possibility.
   “What about your head?” I asked, deliberately using a normal voice.
   “It hurts,” she said. “I think maybe a concussion. I don’t really remember it hitting. Or you getting home. I’ve got a headache, it’s not blinding or anything but it’s not going away anytime soon.”
   “We should take you to the hospital. It’s just down the street.”
   “Don’t be an idiot. He wasn’t making empty threats. He’ll kill us. He’ll find us and rape me and torture you and kill us both. Do you not get it?”
   “I get it,” I said. “But I think he was lying about knowing about hospitals.”
   “If he can find out we went to the FBI, he can find out we went to a hospital.”
   “I’m not so sure. But okay. I think for concussions they just keep you under observation anyway.”
   I had cleaned Talena’s wounds with soap as she hissed with pain, smeared antibiotic cream all over them, then wadded an old T-shirt on Talena’s chest and taped it down firmly. It seemed to have stanched the bleeding. We took three ibuprofen each. There wasn’t much else we could do for her headache, or the gargantuan yellowing bruise beneath my breastbone, or my hugely swollen gonads. Now we lay on the couch, each of us slumped on one end, our legs crossing in the middle. I had turned the TV on, volume low, to create the illusion of warmth and company. It wasn’t much but at this point we were ready to take whatever comforting delusions we could find.
   “What about you?” she asked. “Do you think you’re okay?”
   I shrugged. “I’ll be okay. I’m not coughing blood or anything.”
   “But, Jesus, Paul, your balls, they…they don’t look so good.”
   “Normal,” I assured her. “Just like when Jeff Koller kicked me in the nuts in fourth grade. I’ll be okay as long as I walk slow and careful. They’ll be fine in a few days. Probably no sex for a week, but fine.” I still felt nauseous, and every breath caused pain to blossom anew in my stomach, but I didn’t want to worry her. It wasn’t like I was coughing up blood. At least not yet.
   “I’m not going to be Miss Sex-Positive any time soon either,” Talena said bitterly. “I thought he was going to rape me. I was, I always thought, it would be awful but just physical, you know? I figured if it ever happened I’d deal with it OK, I figured I survived the seige of Sarajevo, I could survive rape. But when I thought he was going to do it, in front of you, that was the worst part, I felt like I was about to have the worst thing in the world happen to me. Like the worst thing in the world that could ever happen was really about to happen.” She started to shiver.
   “It’s okay,” I tried to soothe her. “It’s okay. We’re all right. Nothing awful happened. Well, nothing too awful, nothing, nothing irrevocable. We’re okay. We’re fine.”
   “We’re not fine,” she said bitterly.
   “No,” I said. “No we’re not. But we will be.”
   “You think so? I don’t think so. We’re fucking traumatized. Don’t pretend we’re not. And now if we say nothing then we let one of the most evil fucking monsters on the planet go ahead and live. In our city. Our home. But if we say something he’ll find out and find us and him and his witch wife will fucking torture us to death for real. You call that fine? You tell me just what’s going to be so fucking fine about that.”
   I didn’t have an answer.
   “How did they know?” Talena asked. “How could they possibly have known? Did they put some kind of bug on you in Belize? Or Agent Turner, did you ever talk about her? We told one person, a fucking FBI agent, and they knew fucking everything.”
   “I don’t know. Not a bug, the battery would have died a long time ago. Maybe they hired some Romanian hackers who cracked the FBI’s computers or something. Not likely, but neither is anything else. But not Agent Turner. She wouldn’t have…We can trust her, I’m sure.”
   “Yeah. So am I. She’s safe.” Talena took a deep breath. “Maybe…Paul, I think we should talk about this now. Right away. The longer we wait the more scared we’re going to get, and…Shit. I’m already scared to even say this. Paul, I think we should go to her again. I think we should tell her everything, everything, and ask her for protection. We can’t say nothing and let them get away. We just can’t.”
   I looked at her and didn’t answer.
   “We can’t let them go,” Talena said. “Getting them, I don’t know, some kind of justice, that’s bigger than us. You know that, don’t you? It’s more important than we are.”
   “I don’t want to go to Agent Turner,” I said.
   “Paul…” She hesitated. “I understand. I do. You’re frightened for me, aren’t you? Don’t be. Not that, I know you can’t not be, but you can’t let it paralyze you, that’s what he’s counting on, we have to –”
   “No. You don’t understand. I don’t want to go to the FBI because I don’t want them arrested.”
   “What?”
   “I don’t want them arrested. I want them dead.”
   Talena looked at me incredulously.
   “Fuck the FBI,” I said. “Weeks to get a warrant and then years to extradite them, if they can find them in the first place, which is probably impossible, since they’ll probably know when the FBI’s investigating them. I want them dead. I’ll do it myself. With not a second’s hesitation, believe me. Not a fucking second.”
   “Paul…okay…Paul, being too macho is just as bad as being too frightened here. You’re not, you’re just not a killer, okay?”
   “Yeah? Remember what happened the last time I wanted somebody dead?”
   “I thought you didn’t actually do that yourself,” Talena said.
   “No, fine, not physically me, it was Hallam who physically did it, but I was willing. And right now, believe me, I am extra willing. I am fucking eager.”
   “Well.” She looked at me for a moment like she didn’t quite recognize me. “I’m glad you’re angry. It’s good. You should be. We should both be fucking furious, and we are, I am too, that’s good, it’s healthy, but Paul, we have to channel it in a halfway constructive way, not in some crazy revenge mission. It would be good enough to turn them over to the FBI. You understand? It would be good enough. And it would be a whole fuck of a lot easier. And it would be a whole lot less likely to end up in one of us weeping on top of the other’s grave or spending our whole lives waiting for next month’s conjugal prison visit.”
   “True,” I said reluctantly.
   “Good,” Talena said. “Good. So we’re agreed? We’ll go to Agent Turner tomorrow?”
   “Fuck tomorrow,” I said. “Let’s call her right now.”
   “Good idea. They won’t expect that.”
   “They don’t expect us to do anything. Or we wouldn’t be breathing. Zoltan thinks we’re like, I don’t know, mice. He thinks we’re going to spend the rest of our lives being paralyzed we’re so scared of him. He thinks we’re pathetic.”
   “That’s good,” she said. “Don’t be angry about that. It’s good. Overconfidence is good.”
   “Yeah,” I said. “It’s good. With any luck it will be the fucking death of him.”
   I reached for the phone, lifted it up, and replaced it on its hook.
   “What is it?” she asked.
   “We should use a pay phone,” I said.
   “Oh. Right.”