Edge Play X (37 page)

“You’re quitting
now
?”

“Yes.”

Simeon tossed the pack into the trash.

“I’m sorry, X, I just thought with all
you had been through lately…”

“It’s because I want to live, Simeon.”

X stood up and went over to sit on the
couch, putting her head onto her bent legs and crying. Seeing her that way made
Simeon pity her, made him feel uncertain about how to proceed. He went to the
couch and sat down next to her, put his hand onto her back.

“It’s over now, X. You’re alive.”

She lifted up her head.

“I want to know something, Agent
Simeon. Was
Compton
going to give them their ransom?”

“I’m not certain,” he answered.

“Tell me,” she demanded. “I need to
know.”

Simeon rubbed the scar on his jaw. “X,
it does not appear that he was willing to relinquish the money.”

The sobs came again.

“He would have just let me die? He
would have let them kill me?” She was angry now, hurt and angry.

“X, you took the car he gave you and
left. He figured out what happened. Did you take his money, too?”

X was silent, not wanting to
incriminate herself.

“Look, X, I know that there was a
rather large deposit into your bank account shortly before you went on the run.
I don’t know what you did to
Compton
to get that money, but when you took it and left,
he wasn’t pleased.”

X understood. What could she expect?
But still, two million dollars was just a small fraction of the man’s wealth.
Compton
had written her a check for a million without a
flinch and then sent her a Mercedes as a thank you, some kind of sick reward
for giving him the thrill of being blackmailed. He would have let her die not
because of the money, but to prove a point. Any inroads the two had made
together in
Paris
were now overgrown with her rage. Were it not for
Simeon, she’d be dead.

“You can still be of help to us,”
Simeon said. “We’ll make it seem like you escaped the kidnappers and you can
return to
California
and help us implicate
Compton
once and for all.”

Revenge.
The idea made X’s mouth water. X wiped off the
last of her tears and tried to pull herself together.

She thought about Simeon and how he
had saved her life. He hadn’t punished her when she had deserved it. And now,
he was offering her another chance. She reached out and put her hand gently
over his.

“Simeon, can we begin again?”

Simeon did not answer, just reached up
to her face and ran his thumb over the bruise under her eye. X’s jumble of
emotions was now supplanted with another, quite unexpected, somewhat unwelcome,
as thick as honey.

And this
sensation, that of romantic love, made X feel as if she were an asteroid
entering a foreign atmosphere. It compressed the air around her, causing it to
heat up and incinerate the outer layers of her being, diminishing her persona
as it throttled towards a force more powerful than her own, reducing her to the
core, its glow vaporizing the stratums of her being in a vibrant and fleeting
display, displacing her from her planned trajectory.
 

He leaned
in to kiss her then, sealing the deal, certain then that it was him, not
Compton, whom X desired.

*

They made love in every room, on every
available surface, in every way. Their individual bodies, no longer sovereign
territories, merged and melded until what was previously autonomous flesh now
was extended and enhanced, the pleasure of each lover amplifying the conduction
of the other, heightening the rapture of axon and dendrite, allying them in
ecstasy.
 

And then one morning, Simeon told her
that it was time to go back to
California
. She didn’t want to return. She wanted to stay
with Simeon, continue to spend all day immersed in the viscous nectar of
fucking, trysts interrupted only for physical necessities like eating or
showering or sleeping or using the bathroom.

And yet, what other choice did she
have? She missed her life in
California
, had been a fool to think that she could stay
away. One of those times that Simeon had gone out for a quick drive so that he
could talk to his superior, he had been told to return and to bring X back with
him. He had broken the news to her the next morning. So it would be.

Simeon told her the news with a tinge
of apology, said that it was out of his control, and anyway, they couldn’t stay
at the safe house forever. He went on to say that their access person had told
Compton
that X had escaped the kidnappers and was on her
way back to
California
.

X thought about asking him who their
access person was but decided against it. She knew who it was. Steinberg. Who
else could it be, who else had such access to the man?

X packed her things, nearly forgetting
the Van Gogh in the process, and then, through the heat of the desert, they
returned to
California
. X was home.

Act V

1.

It was a beautiful day, perfect almost.
The sky was spotted with puffy clouds, mellifluous billows which moved so
slowly that they appeared to have been painted onto a smooth blue canvas. A
breeze was coming in from the peninsula and sweeping in through the open
windows of the studio. In the distance, a crane was slowly lifting beams into a
new structure.

X had been back for nearly a week,
time in which Compton had sent her flowers every day again, the first bunch
coming with a note that said that he was grateful that she was alright and that
he couldn’t wait to see her again. She had given a weak explanation to Michael
about why she had returned, saying that everything in her life was fine, she
wasn’t worried anymore, had probably overreacted, and thanks for the help but
she couldn’t stay away forever.
 

And Simeon, he had stopped over for a
couple evenings, time they had spent in the smooth confines of X’s bed. He
hadn’t stayed the night, telling her that it would look suspicious if he and X
spent too much time together. But still, he would make efforts to see her as
much as he could.

She borrowed a gun from Michael, one
that had belonged to his father, resolute that she would never be kidnapped
again.

And this particular morning when X
painted in her studio, she was joined by her studio mate, a German sculptor
named Helmut who had recently returned from
Europe
. X thought that he was a gifted sculptor but an airhead of a man.
Regardless, they had been happy to see each other, exchanging warm hugs and
conversation before delving into their own work. X was having trouble painting
and thought that perhaps her mind had been muddled from all the sex.

The man worked at the far end of the
studio, returning to a piece that he had abandoned last summer when he left.
Helmut had already completed a large wire framework of a horse. That alone had
taken him months to do and it had sat in the studio all winter like a skeleton
in a barn. Now, he was busy adding paper-
maché
over
the interlace of wire, putting slim strips into a trough of glue and then
pulling the paper between his fingers, flicking the remaining adhesive back
into the trough before adding the newsprint onto the framework. He had started
at the horse’s ass.

They worked like this for hours, X
painting at her easel, listening to Murder by Death through her
earbuds
, Helmut at the other end of the studio busy adding
a paper skin to the horse. It would be lunch soon, and X’s stomach was
growling. With some plastic wrap, X began to cover her brushes (flat, angle,
rigger, filbert, and fan), just something to keep them from drying out while
she was gone. X considered where she would go for lunch. Maybe she’d ask Helmut
to go along so that they could catch up.

But as she wrapped her hog hair
brushes (finally she had been able to buy the best that were available), X
noticed something from the periphery of her vision. The image lasted just a few
seconds, enough to garner her attention. She watched as a gust blew through the
window, a fast entrance of wind that caused Helmut’s haphazard stack of
newspapers to begin to blow through the room, lifting them up to the ceiling,
pushing them as weightless as dandelion parachutes all through the room,
scattering the pile entirely in a mini tornado.

What had surprised X was not the gust
of wind (for those were expected), but that she was quite sure that the surge
had been infused with effervescent bursts of light, insubstantial yet visible.
It had been lustrous and radiant, that influx of light, ethereal and
weightless. Apparitional. The gust had brought along with it the scent of
flowers, rose and hyacinth perhaps, jasmine most definitely, but like the wind,
the smell was gone as quickly as it had arrived.

X, thinking she was hallucinating,
asked Helmut, “Did you see that?”

“Oh, yes, what a wind!” he said as
they worked together to gather the loose papers and then put them into a short
cardboard box. They wrangled the newsprint from the corners, from the
stairwell, from under the old radiator.
 

They were almost finished when X, a
few sheets of the old newsprint in her hands, looked down at the society page
which she held. When she saw the photo of Terry Compton, one in which he still
had his atrocity of a mustache, X looked at the date. The paper was over two
years old, discolored and brittle. X read the caption under the photo which had
been taken at a charity event in the Bay area. She looked at the photo again,
surprised this time by what she saw. In the background of the photo was another
man, one she recognized quite well. He was smiling and laughing, a cocktail in his
hand, just a face in the crowd.

X stared at this photo. She had not
seen this other man for a long time. He was an accountant, a man who had done
her taxes for a couple years. She remembered a series of specifics about him:
his car, his apartment, his breakfast preference. And as she looked at this
photo, a group of synapses made contact with neurons, and in a matter of
milliseconds, a memory came to her. X recalled the photo Simeon had shown her
when he had taken her to the fake hotel room. Finally, she recalled the last
time she had worn that particular ensemble, recalled when its zipper had
broken.

She kept a hold of this paper, telling
Helmut that she had to go, that she would see him soon and they could catch up.
And then hastily, X ran downstairs where she found Anne at her desk, looking at
some papers through her reading glasses.

“Hello my dear,” Anne said, “you look
as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

X nearly told the woman about the
strange event she had just witnessed.

“Anne, I was wondering if you could do
me a favor.”

“Yes, dear, anything for you.”

“That man you are dating, the one who
works for the state tax department. Would he be able to get me somebody’s tax
returns? I just need to look at them for a minute.”

Anne looked at X quizzically, then pushed
her glasses up her nose.

“I am afraid that he would never do
that,” she told her, to which X nodded her head in understanding and gave a
defeated sigh. “I, however, happen to have his password,” she continued, going
over to her computer and opening up a new screen. “The poor fool uses the same
one for everything.”

And within a few minutes, Anne had
printed her out the last several years of tax returns for a man named Andrew
Tomlinson, a pile of papers which X took back with her to her apartment,
ruminating for a few hours before phoning Steinberg and saying to him quite
directly, “Please set up a time for me and Mr. Compton to get together again.”

2.

There was
satori
and then there was the gun. So many things end with a gun, end with an
explosion.
 

X took her gun along with her to the
dungeon. It wasn’t a real dungeon, X thought as she entered. Or maybe it was.
Torture happened in all kinds of different ways.

Compton
was on his seat again, still as ever.
A nearly naked man on a simple seat.
The
thinker.
Why didn’t he ever twiddle his thumbs, tap his foot,
fiddle
around? He was deliberate, methodical. The weight of
it descended on X. Never before had the sheer mass of it been so apparent to
her. She had underestimated him and his desires. Motivations were a difficult
thing to understand; they attracted assumptions.

He would do what she told him to do, X
knew that. It would be nothing to restrain him and really torture him, scar him
for life. But that was what he wanted, not so much the pain but for X to cause
the pain. Making him suffer caused her to relinquish a part of herself; that
was part of the pleasure he derived. Even love would not be a fitting reaction
because that would mean that he still had power over her. She would excuse
herself from his game momentarily, release herself from him, and that would be
his punishment. First, there were questions.