Die for You (29 page)

A
FEW HOURS
earlier we returned to Jack’s apartment and retrieved an envelope of cash from beneath his mattress. The next steps weren’t as clear to him as they were to me.

The truth was, it wasn’t just that. In fact, when he said the word—
Praha
—it made a deep kind of sense to me, as though I’d known it all along. Jack wouldn’t buy that. After all, who was going to trust my instincts at the moment? I had to convince him.

“Marcus is not going to stay in the U.S. He can’t. He has run his con and now he’s going back where he came from.”

“You don’t know that. I thought you said he hated the Czech Republic, that he never wanted to go home.”

“It’s the only course open to him now.”

“You don’t know that,” he repeated.

“He can disappear. Take back his name, Kristof Ragan, and just leave. At this point, they don’t even know his real identity. He’ll be swallowed. They’ll never find him. What’s the extradition policy between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?”

Jack looked at me blankly. “How should I know?”

The other truth was that I didn’t have any ideas about where else he could be. Was it a desperate act to board a plane to Prague in search of my husband? Yes. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Out of sheer exhaustion, not a lack of anxiety or urgency, I lay on the plush down of Jack’s bed as he threw things into a large duffel bag—jeans, underwear, some old clothes of mine from a night I’d spent here after a party, a pair of sneakers I’d left after the last time we ran in Central Park together. When I closed my eyes I saw the dying stranger in Central Park. I saw my ruined home. Jack left the room for a minute and came back with a shaving kit.

“I packed you a toothbrush.”

“We’re not going on vacation.”

“You can’t travel overseas without luggage. It looks suspicious.”

Jack was ever the pragmatist; I always feared his reading of my novels. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “How did she get from here to there?” Or: “How did he find her in that huge crowd?” Or: “What’s her motivation for doing what she did? It doesn’t make sense.”

He liked the linear progression, the logical course of events, motivations so obvious that they didn’t brook questions. I liked the illogical leap in time and tense. Meaning that the nuts and bolts—how the window got unlocked or what vehicle was used to transport my character from this scene to that—bored and annoyed me.

It’s the essence, the energy of character and action that moves me. I don’t want to tell how the vase found its way to the ground. Was it dropped? Was it thrown? I just want to show the shards, glistening and sharp, on the marble floor. Because that’s life. We don’t always act out of logic. Things can’t always be explained. Sometimes we don’t know how the vase got there, just that it has shattered, irreparably.

“Let me ask you something,” Jack said. He zipped up the duffel and moved it over toward the door. Then he returned to sit at the foot of the bed. “What’s this about?”

“We’ve already had this conversation. You know what it’s about.”

“Is it justice you’re looking for? Or revenge? When and if you find him, how exactly do you plan to dole that out?”

I didn’t answer, just stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t looking for an answer. This was his way.
Just put it in your pipe and smoke it
, he’d say.

“Or is it just about the why and how, Isabel? Is it just about the knowing, the understanding that you need?”

I still didn’t feel compelled to answer.

“Because I’m your friend. I’m with you. I’ll buy the tickets. I’ll get on a plane and go with you wherever you need to go. But let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.”

“What makes a right reason?” I asked.

“Something that, when bad things happen and it all goes to shit, is still worth all the trouble. Something that means enough to risk everything you’re risking right now.”

I looked at his profile, the crooked ridge of his nose. He seemed tired to me suddenly. I looked around the room and noticed that it was another minimal space, like his office. Just the low platform bed, covered in expensive linens. The walls were white, the floor hardwood. Where was all his stuff? His magazines and dirty clothes, his photographs and unpaid bills? I remembered his dorm room from NYU—a pigsty of staggering proportions. When did he become so neat, so anti-clutter?

“My father didn’t leave a note,” I said. We’d never really talked about this element of my life, though of course he knew. And it had come up again and again in my fiction. He was a careful reader. He probably knew my issues relating to my father’s death better than anyone, including myself. For Jack, I was an open book.

“Okay, Isabel,” he said softly. “I get it.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“I know that.”

He moved over to the door and, with effort, I lifted myself off his bed.

“You have to do one thing before we go. Nonnegotiable,” he said. “Two things, actually.”

“What?”

“One: Call your sister. And two: Write down everything you didn’t tell that detective and e-mail it to him. Let him know you’re on his side. It might work in your favor. It might even help you get what you want—answers.”

I thought about arguing, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was unmovable on these matters. Also, a small part of me still recognized a good idea when I heard one. I did what he asked. I left a message for my sister, surprised to get her voice mail. And I wrote a long note to Detective Crowe, telling him everything I had learned, including my husband’s real name and mentioning the e-mail I’d had from Camilla. Then, whether it was the right action or not, for the right reasons or not, Jack and I left for the airport.

I lifted my glass and the attendant was quick to refill and I was quick to drain that as well. Jack didn’t bother with any more warnings; he just leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

All I had was my husband’s given name, the name of a town outside of Prague, and the vaguest idea that it was to that place Marcus might return. I thought of the last kiss we shared, the horrible scream I heard, the woman S preening on the Web site. I thought of the dying man and his last whispers. But even with all of this swimming in the dark waters of my mind, the two glasses of champagne helped me to drift into a troubled sleep. I dreamed of my father.

They emerged from a slow crawl through bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, inexplicable at that hour, and were cruising down Queens Boulevard. A twelve-lane, in some areas sixteen-lane, main thoroughfare affectionately known as the Boulevard of Broken Bones because of the high rate of pedestrian deaths, it was one of the longest streets in Queens. It was modeled after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but to Grady it had none of that romantic aura of lost grandeur that the Concourse had, where magnificent old buildings had grayed with neglect, sagged with disappointment and sadness at the deterioration of a once-great neighborhood, modeled after the promenades of European cities. Queens Boulevard was just a thriving urban center with gigantic apartment high-rises, chains and independent businesses lining the roadway. It was New York, but somehow energetically apart, somehow its own thing, minus any of the glitz and glam of Manhattan. It was just Queens. They passed a gun shop and a liquor store, a flurry of fast-food joints, a Cuban hole-in-the-wall.

Grady pulled the Caprice into a spot across the street from a large warehouse building that bore the address he’d found on the Internet. He’d expected something garish with bright lights and lines down the block, a “gentleman’s” club maybe, with cars lining the street and all the typical losers you find at such a place—the frat boys looking to party, coming off the train in packs, raucous, self-conscious; the rich guys taking a night off from their marriages, pulling up in Hummers; the pervs, quiet and badly dressed, waiting with hands in pockets.

But the block was relatively quiet; most of the businesses—a copy shop, a pet store, a men’s big and tall—were all gated for the night. Every few minutes a cab would pull up—once with a group of a gorgeous young girls dressed to the hilt, the next an old man in a black wool coat, the next two young guys in business suits carrying sleek black laptop cases. They all disappeared behind a plain black door, opened from the inside by someone who stayed out of sight of the street.

“She was a working girl, wasn’t she?” Jez said out of nowhere.

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t think a woman would come to this place if she wasn’t in the industry—a dancer, a higher-end call girl. According to her credit report, she wasn’t employed, but that SoHo apartment? A nice one-bedroom in that neighborhood? A couple grand a month, at least.”

“Maybe our faux Marcus Raine was giving her money,” said Grady.

She nodded. “Maybe. But why else would she come here?”

“Maybe she came here to meet someone.”

“Yeah, like a john.”

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Well, let’s go in and take a look around, ask a few questions.”

He felt the phone in his pocket vibrate. He pulled it out to see that he had an e-mail message from Isabel Connelly. He almost didn’t recognize her name, he was so accustomed to thinking of her as Isabel Raine. The subject line read: “Some things you should know.”

“Oh, brother,” he said.

“What is it?”

He held the screen up so Jez could lean her head in, and they read Isabel’s e-mail together.

Jez looked nervous, as if she sensed some danger he did not. She tugged on his shoulder and he leaned down so that she could yell in his ear over the music.

“We should get out of here, call for backup and get this place shut down for a few hours. We might get more cooperation.”

On a T-shaped stage naked women of all shapes and sizes flaunted their goods to a hypnotic trance beat. Their mouths smiled but their eyes were empty, high or otherwise elsewhere. Some of them looked so young, too young to be here, still had that creamy fresh cast to their skin, that soft innocence about the mouth.

Grady always hated places like this. He liked a dancing naked female body as much as the next guy, but he battled an urge to run around with bathrobes, cover these girls up and take them home to their mamas. Of course, their mamas were probably in worse shape. You didn’t wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.

Watching a redhead deftly move out of reach of a groping hand, Grady thought of Clara. How long had it been since he’d made love to her? What did Sean say, nearly two years since she’d walked out the door? A year of legal separation following that. Not counting their breakup fuck—that sad, slow final hour they shared after leaving the attorney’s office. He’d convinced her to have coffee with him, and they wound up back at the new place she shared with Sean, a spacious two-bedroom in the Fifties, with a terrace and nice views, that he had no idea how they could afford. He took great pleasure in having her one last time in a bed she shared with her new boyfriend. He’d have pissed on the sheets when he was done if he could. She’d thrown him out afterward, turning from passionate, weepy, and nostalgic to angry as soon as the afterglow dimmed.

“I can’t believe how I let you manipulate me. Still! Even after we’re divorced.”

“There’s no divorce in the eyes of God. You’re still my wife.” He was only half kidding.

“Get out, Grady.”

“Come on, Clara. You know there’s still something. Don’t do this.”

She strode naked over to her bag, her perfect heart-shaped ass jiggling pleasantly with her stride. She fished out the papers, turned and held them up, utterly unself-conscious of her teardrop breasts and flat brown middle. “It’s done. Signed, sealed, delivered.”

“I’m yours.” He finished the verse, trying to be funny. But the words fell flat and sad on the ground between them.

“Go.”