No Way Back (21 page)

At the top of the stairs, she leads me down a long hallway. We stop at the apartment marked ‘309’. She fiddles with a key in the lock, then shoves the door with her shoulder. I
follow her in. We’re hit by a blast of wintry air. An air conditioner roars in the window like a jet.

‘What do you think?’ she asks, standing aside to give me a better view.

‘I think electricity must be included in your rent,’ I say, shivering.

‘I leave it on,’ she says. ‘Because I like the cold.’

‘You moved to the wrong state.’

‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘I will pee.’

She disappears around a corner. I sit on the couch as instructed. I look around. It’s a standard sunbelt apartment: white stucco plaster ceiling, a medium-pile beige carpet, a breakfast
bar overlooking a tiny galley kitchen, and a sliding glass door with Levolor blinds leading to a patio. No photographs, no books. It’s simultaneously clean, and depressing: the apartment of a
woman who is one part hard-worker, and one part flight-risk.

I hear the sound of urine tinkling on porcelain. ‘So now I will tell you my story,’ she calls from the other room, as she pees. I wonder whether she has left the bathroom door open.
I peer around the corner, but can’t see.

‘Maybe you want to finish up first,’ I suggest.

She ignores this. ‘I was born in Russia. You knew that, didn’t you?’

‘You have an accent,’ I say. ‘Just a slight one.’

‘When I was twelve, I ran away to Moscow. There was a man. He told me I should model for magazines.’

The toilet flushes. I hear water in the basin, and then the sound of rapid soapy hand-washing. Soon she’s back, rejoining me in the living room. ‘He called himself an agent,’
she continues. ‘But he wasn’t, not really.’ She sits on the couch beside me, on her knees, with her feet behind her. ‘I visited him one night, so that he could evaluate me.
That’s what he called it: “evaluate”. He did evaluate me, in a way. There were a lot of men, not just him. I won’t tell you everything. But you can imagine.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She waves her hand, dismissing sentiment. ‘I never saw my family again. They brought me to different houses, and different cities, and soon I didn’t know where I was. After a few
months, they brought me to this country. I worked for them. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘They called me a dancer. But I did more than dance. I did everything. Whatever they told me.’

‘Why didn’t you... ’ I stop before I utter the words. But it’s too late. She knows what I’m going to say.

‘Escape?’ she suggests, and laughs. I nod.

‘Let me tell you a story. On the first night, they picked one girl from the group. Just at random. I remember the one they chose. She was standing right next to me. She had blonde hair,
and she was very young and very pretty. They unrolled plastic sheets, onto the ground, and they told her to stand on the middle of the sheets, because they didn’t want to clean the carpet. No
one understood what they meant. They told all the girls to gather around and watch. They took out a gun, and put it into the young girl’s mouth, and they shot her. Just like that. And then
they said to the rest of us, ‘This is what happens. If anyone tries to leave, this is what we do. We’ll kill you, and we’ll kill your family in Russia, too, because we know where
they live. But—’ She raises a finger, and pauses. Her face takes on a stony hard look. ‘But, if you’re good, and you do what we say, you can earn your freedom.’

She slinks closer to me on the couch. Part of me wants to comfort her – to put an arm around her, to hold her – this girl from another land, who was taken from her home. But I know
not to. She does not seek my comfort. She does not seek any man’s comfort.

‘I will tell you a secret,’ she says. ‘Do you want to hear my secret?’

‘All right.’

‘It doesn’t matter how they threaten, because soon you don’t
want
to escape. They give you things, to make you like being there. You
want
to stay. Do you
understand?’

‘Drugs,’ I say. I try to sound clinical, but my voice is thin and excited despite myself, the way you sound when you try to speak casually the name of an old lover.

‘Yes.’ She comes closer. ‘Oh yes,’ she purrs. ‘How nice it was.’ I can feel her warm skin next to mine. ‘You know that feeling, don’t you,
Jim?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve tried.’

Not a question. ‘Yes.’

‘From that first day at the company, I knew. We can recognize each other. Can’t we, Jim?’

It’s true. Being an addict is like being in a club. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s something straights can’t understand. When I walk down the street, I know. Just
looking at strangers, I know – I know who is on, and who is off, and who is heading back. There’s something in our eyes. We’re searching. We never find it, but we’re always
looking. It’s a hollow, haunted, hungry look. Amanda has it, too. Some part of me always knew that.

Amanda continues, ‘I did terrible things. I wish I could... ’ She shakes her head. ‘I wish I could take them out of here.’ She points to her skull.

‘I know that feeling.’

She leans over. For a moment I think she’s going to kiss me. But then she turns away. She says, ‘Jesus rescued me.’

I repeat stupidly: ‘Jesus... rescued you?’

I sit there, squinting, trying to picture Jesus, with flowing white robes, leading some kind of Delta Force extraction of Amanda from a Russian’s compound, abseiling down walls and evading
laser-scoped rifles.

‘I prayed,’ she says, ‘and he saved me. He gave me a new life.’

‘But... how did you escape?’

She shakes her head and waves her hand, as if that subject is uninteresting – mere logistics. ‘It doesn’t matter. Once you decide you want to leave, there’s always a way.
The hard part is deciding. But I did. And then I came to Florida. I moved in with a girl – a college girl. She taught me what to do, and how to act, and how to get a job. I got a GED. I fixed
my English. I took a receptionist job. Men like hiring pretty girls for their front desks. Have you noticed that, Jim? That’s how I found Tao.’

‘Well I’m glad you’re here.’

‘What a
boss
thing to say,’ she scoffs. ‘You’re “glad I’m here”. Why on earth would you be glad I’m here, answering your
telephone?’

I search for an answer. After a long moment: ‘We
do
get a lot of calls.’

She laughs. ‘You see how you hide?’

‘Hide?’

‘Behind jokes, Jim. You try to distract people. You’re very devious.’

‘I didn’t know I was devious.’

‘A devious man. You always avoid the question. Even now, you are avoiding it.’

‘What question is that?’

She leans close, lowers her voice. ‘You know the question.’

I don’t. Not really.

She says: ‘Here you are, a married man, on a Thursday night, in your receptionist’s apartment. On her couch. And she’s very close to you. Very close. She could be naked at any
moment.’

‘But she’s not.’

‘But she could be,’ she whispers. She leans in, and her lips brush my ear. She whispers, so close and soft, that her words are just warm breath against my skin. ‘The question
is: What are you going to do?’

‘It is a very good question,’ I admit. ‘Tricky.’

‘I’ve seen your wife’s photograph. She is so pretty.’ I can smell her perfume. It’s the scent of flowers, rich and sweet, like a funeral spray.

Amanda leans forward to kiss me. Her tongue slides across mine. We remain still, mouths pressed together, gently. She breaks off the kiss, and looks at me.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asks.

I lean back, away from her.

‘You know what’s funny?’ I say. ‘I was talking to my shrink. I told him that I wanted to become a new man. A better man. I think the
old
Jimmy Thane would have
wanted to fuck you.’

‘And the
new
Jimmy Thane?’

‘The new Jimmy Thane wants to fuck you, too. That’s why I’m beginning to suspect my shrink is no good.’

And then, because it’s the only decent thing to say: ‘I have to leave now, Amanda. I have to go home to my wife.’

She looks me over for a long time. For a moment I think she’s going to slap me, or cry, or yell, ‘Then get the hell out!’ But she does none of those things. She says, brightly,
‘You see? I told you he would be here tonight.’

‘Who?’

‘Jesus. I told you he would be here, in this apartment. Now you see for yourself. He is inside you.’

‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t feel Jesus inside me. But then again, I don’t feel much of anything inside me. I’m just tired. So tired.

I stand up, head to the door. Amanda follows.

‘I need a ride back to the office, Amanda,’ I say. ‘Would you mind?’

She grabs her car keys from the side table and tosses them to me. ‘Take my car. Leave it in the office. I’ll get a ride in the morning.’

‘Thank you.’

I turn to leave. She grabs my arm. ‘Jim,’ she says, with a grin. ‘Don’t you want to ask?’

‘Ask what?’

She takes my hand, and guides my fingers to her breast. Her nipple stiffens under my touch. She keeps her palm over mine, preventing me from moving. ‘Ask me what it means.’ She
presses my fingers down, on the place where I saw her tattoo. ‘I saw you looking. Can you read Russian?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to know what it means?’

‘What does it mean?’ I ask dutifully.

‘“Jesus died for my sins.”’

‘
That’s
what it means? Why do you... ’ I pause. ‘Why do you have that tattooed on your breast?’

‘So that I can
remember
it,’ she says, emphatically.

‘When I want to remember something, I just use Post-it Notes.’

She laughs. ‘You see?’ She removes her hand from mine. Reluctantly I lift my fingers from her breast. ‘Do you see how you use jokes? To hide from the truth?’

I’m too tired to argue.

In the parking lot, as I walk to her car, I hear the thrum of tyres on the other side of the noise abatement wall. I feel a strange surge of emotion, something I can’t identify at first.
It’s not regret – regret that I didn’t make love to her – which is the feeling I was expecting to have by now. This feeling is something different.

Triumph.

Yes, that’s what it is. For the first time I can remember, I didn’t give in to my urges. My base, evil urges.

Maybe this is the start. Maybe this is the new Jimmy Thane.

As I climb into her car, I smile. The
new
Jimmy Thane. I like the sound of that.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Dr Liago says.

We’re sitting in his study, that odd room built entirely of leather and wood – oak floors, bookshelves filled with calf-skin bindings, window shades with oak slats shut tight –
a room that is somewhere between English gentleman’s club and New Jersey funeral parlour. Four days have passed since my visit to Amanda’s apartment, four days of relative calm –
relative, anyway, for Jimmy Thane – four days without a church-basement exorcism, or an abortive sexual escapade, or a public drinking binge in the office lunchroom.

I glance at the clock on Liago’s desk, old-fashioned enough to proclaim ‘Electric’ proudly on its face. It glows orange.

‘Nothing happened,’ I say. ‘I left her apartment and I went home to my wife.’

‘And what did your wife say, when you told her where you went?’

‘I didn’t tell her.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not?’ I laugh. ‘Are you married, Dr Liago?’

A simple question, I think. A question that requires only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for an answer. But Liago strokes his short white beard and mulls over this question as if I have
asked him about the mysteries of string theory or quantum physics. He says, finally, ‘I wonder why it is that you want to know that.’

‘Just making conversation,’ I say.

‘Is it important to you? To know whether I’m married?’

‘Forget it, Doc. Sorry I asked.’

‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘Married.’

‘I didn’t tell Libby where I went, because nothing happened, and it wasn’t worth the trouble.’

‘Hmm,’ he says, nodding. ‘You’ve had quite a week. You broke into someone’s house and found cash in a garbage bag. You suspect that the man who hired you is
involved in some sort of criminal enterprise. And you drank again – drank champagne—’

‘I didn’t exactly drink,’ I insist. ‘It was a party, and I was forced to do it.’

‘You were
forced
to drink,’ he says, in that maddening tone used by psychiatrists and parents – the one where they repeat your words exactly, thereby making you sound
ridiculous and guilty.

‘That’s exactly right.’

‘And you looked down your secretary’s shirt and saw her breasts. And you kissed her.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘More or less. The kiss wasn’t much. It lasted just for a second.’

‘Do you want my opinion?’

‘No.’

‘These do not sound like the actions of a man who wants to live a quiet and normal life. Do you agree?’

‘I suppose.’

‘On its own, everything you’ve told me has a perfectly acceptable explanation. You broke into a house because you wanted to find out who was stealing from your company. You sipped
alcohol because your Vice President of Marketing was trying to embarrass you.’

‘Vice President of Sales.’

He ignores this. ‘You went out last night with your receptionist because... ’ He stops. ‘Why exactly did you go with her?’

He’s got me. I entered her car and let her drive me because I wanted to fuck her. Because I couldn’t get that image out of my mind, of her breasts, and that Cyrillic tattoo, and
because I wanted to see her outstretched on a bed, naked, with her back arched and her ribcage exposed, so that I could read the writing on her body at my leisure, like a novel with a delicious
twist to the ending.

Dr Liago is waiting for me to explain why I got into Amanda’s car. But the best I can do is offer a guilty smile.

‘You see?’ Liago says, triumphantly. ‘Even the fact that you are investigating this theft from your company – even that, in itself, is self-destructive. Just as Libby
told you it was. You turn over rocks, looking for answers, but the answer is staring at you. You were hired
not
to look for answers. Your venture capitalist, the man who hired
you—’ He glances down at his pad to search for the name. ‘Tad Billups. He doesn’t want you poking around, answering policemen’s questions about Ghol Gedrosian. He told
you this. But what do you do? You poke around. The very fact that you do this is a way of destroying yourself – of denying yourself that fresh start that you deserve. Do you see?’