No Way Back (35 page)

Libby’s Mercedes is gone. But I didn’t expect her to be home. How can you stay in a house, waiting for your husband, when you’re leading a secret life, working for someone
else, fucking someone else?

Inside, I walk up the stairs, to our bedroom. I start in her underwear drawer – because that’s where women keep their secrets. I run my hands through her clothes. I’m not sure
what I’m looking for: the sharp foil edge of a condom, or the soft bulk of a secret diary, or the crinkling paper of a letter from a lover. Maybe a letter written by Tad. Or maybe a letter
penned in Cyrillic.

I find none of these things. Just underwear, and not even much of that.

I move to the closet. I start at the top shelves, feeling between sweaters. Then I kneel, and peer into her shoe-boxes and purses. I find nothing: no notes, no letters, no secrets.

I pad down the stairs into the kitchen, where I open the drawers in quick sequence, flipping through the crap that kitchens accumulate: corkscrews, can openers, dull knives, spatulas, a ball of
twine. I look inside the cabinets next, into the nooks behind the dishes and glassware. I dump into the sink the contents of a ceramic canister filled with flour. A Tupperware of sugar.

Outside, the rain starts to pour. It drums against the roof. Lightning flashes and, seconds later, thunder booms over the house, rattling the windows in their sashes.

There’s another flash, just as I’m looking through the pane of glass, and it illuminates the vegetable plot, and, behind it, the garden shed.

The garden shed. Of course.

I walk out of the front door of the house, leaving it open, and trudge into the rain. It’s coming down hard, pelting my scalp, painfully, soaking my shirt, washing the sweat from my face,
pooling in my shoes.

My feet sink into mud. Rivulets of water race past.

I go to the side of the house. The garden shed is unlocked. I pull the handle. The corrugated tin door screeches in the rusted track.

I find it where I knew it would be, right on the bottom shelf, where I once observed Libby kneeling: a small package, wrapped in white butcher paper.

My hand shakes as I lift it from the shelf. I know I’ve found the answer, even though I don’t yet know the question. I pick at the butcher paper. My fingers are wet, and the paper is
soggy, and it rips under my thumbnail. Inside is a set of three computer DVDs, branded with the Hewlett-Packard logo and the company’s slogan: ‘Invent’.

Each DVD has a handwritten date scrawled in indelible marker: ‘June 2’ and ‘July 12’ and ‘July 19’.

Back in the living room, I slide the first disc into the DVD player – the disc marked ‘June 2’.

It plays immediately. Even without a title, I recognize the genre right away. The clues are obvious: high-contrast video, hot orange skin tone, rough rasping breath on microphones. I’ve
seen it a hundred times, as every American man has.

But something about this pornography – for it
is
pornography, surely – is wrong. Something about it is different.

It’s too real.

The video is of a young girl, maybe fifteen. Her face is familiar. I’ve seen her before, but can’t recall where. Her hair is plastered against her head. She lies on a plastic sheet,
drenched in sweat. She is naked, spreadeagled, probably bound to bedposts that are off-camera. A gag – it looks like a nylon neck tie – is stuffed into her mouth. A brutal strap of
black electrical tape is wrapped across her forehead, keeping her skull stationary. Her eyes are filled with tears.

A male voice, off-camera, speaks. ‘Do you know what is going to happen to you?’ He speaks softly and very slowly. He has a Russian accent. ‘We are going to cut you. We are
going to hurt you. Is that what you want?’

The girl tries to shake her head, frantically, but the electrical tape stops her. Her movements are just small violent twitches.

‘You are so quiet, Lisa. Say something for the camera.’

Her eyes glide sideways and look at me. I’ve never seen a stare like that. I hope never to see it again.

The Russian voice says, languidly, ‘More soon, dear.’ The screen goes black.

I stare at the dark television for a long time. Part of me doesn’t want to put the next DVD into the player, because I already know what I’m going to see, and I have no interest in
seeing it. I want to wrap the DVDs in the butcher paper, and return them to the shed, and never look at them, or think about them, again.

But I can’t. Because I have to know Libby’s secret.

The next DVD is worse. The same girl, the same room – even the same camera angle, but time has passed. Enough time for horrible things to have happened. The girl is no longer scared. There
is little life left in her at all. She is catatonic. She’s still strapped and taped to the bed. Though she is alive, and her eyes are open, and she breathes steadily, she does not move. Snot
and blood and God knows what else are caked on her face. Her cheeks are bruised, her small breasts red and swollen. The fair white skin I saw in the last video is pocked with black circles oozing
puss. Cigarette burns, I somehow know.

The Russian speaks. ‘Such a poor girl,’ he says. He makes a
tsk-tsk
sound. ‘Poor, poor, girl. If you had listened to us, she would be safe. She’d be in school,
enjoying homework and dating, like we promised. But you do a bad job. We gave you instructions, and you failed. You are a stupid girl. He does not believe you. He does not trust you. You must do
better. Next time, you will not like what you see.’

The Russian’s prediction is terrifyingly accurate. The third and last video is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen. The girl is still alive – they’ve apparently made a
point to keep her that way – something that couldn’t have been easy. There’s not much left of her, mentally or physically. She doesn’t look like the pretty young girl of the
first video. She looks hardly human at all. Within what was once her face, her eyes are white and bright and open, but they no longer seem to see.

The Russian, off-camera, says, ‘Do you see what you’ve done? Do you know why we’ve hurt her? Because of you. All because of you. He still does not believe you. This is your
last warning. Our next movie will have a new star. The star will be you.’

From behind me comes Libby’s voice, startling me. ‘What are you doing, Jimmy?’ she asks.

I turn. She stands in the doorway of the foyer, clutching the wall for support. She is soaked with rain, her hair clumped in wet strings. She doesn’t sound angry. Just exhausted. Maybe
even relieved, that I’ve finally found it. ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t have looked.’

‘Who is that girl?’ I say, pointing at the TV, as if there might be doubt about which girl I refer to; but the video has ended, and the screen is black.

‘You don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand what you’ve done.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Please, stop.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Jimmy—’

I yell: ‘Who the fuck is it?’

She opens her mouth to answer, then stops. She looks at me, considering, and then turns and walks away.

I find her upstairs, in the bedroom. She is staring out of the window.

‘I found the picture frame,’ I tell her. ‘I know that you work for Tad.’

She remains still, with her back to me, not turning, not speaking.

‘Who was that girl?’ I ask.

When she doesn’t answer, I say gently – more gently than she deserves, ‘Libby, please. Tell me. Who was she?’

She turns. Her skin is pale, thin like paper, and I see blue veins beneath her eyes. Her lips are pressed together. She looks cold. She answers, just a whisper, ‘My daughter.’

‘Your...
daughter
?’ I shake my head. ‘You don’t have a daughter. You never had a—’ I stop. ‘You had a child before me.’

She says nothing.

‘Why were they doing that to her?’ I ask.

‘It’s a long story, Jimmy. And I don’t think we have the time any more.’

‘I have plenty of time.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No you don’t.’

‘Everything was a lie,’ I say, as understanding dawns at last. ‘Your past... everything you told me... it was all a lie. Am I right, Libby?’ When I say her name, I think
about that night in the restaurant, and the woman who insisted my wife was called something else. ‘My God. Is that even your name? Libby?’

Her eyes move slowly across the room, as if inviting me to follow, and they stop at the ceiling fan. It spins lazily above us, churning the stagnant air.

‘Tell me,’ I say. ‘Tell me what’s going on. Maybe I can help you.’

‘Help me?’ She laughs. ‘No, Jimmy, I’m quite sure you can’t help me.’

‘Who made those videos? They’re blackmailing you. Why? What do they want?’

She stays silent, but it doesn’t matter. I understand now. ‘You don’t work for Tad,’ I say. ‘You work for Ghol Gedrosian. You’ve always worked for him. Where
is he? He’s here, isn’t he?’

She puts a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh.’ She whispers, so softly that I can barely hear the sound through the pelting rain on the roof. ‘Don’t say his name.’

‘Where is he?’ I ask, raising my voice. ‘Where is Ghol Gedrosian?’

Silence.

‘I trusted you. How long have you worked for him? How many years?’

She stares at me with a strange, inscrutable expression. What is it, exactly? Anger? Hatred? Fear?

No, I realize, with a creeping unease. No.

It’s pity. She pities me.

‘You still have no idea what they’ve done to you,’ she says. ‘Do you?’

‘Why is he blackmailing you? What does he want?’

She walks to me and takes my hand. She leans very close. I feel her breath in my ear. It’s our last moment of intimacy, I know, our last moment as husband and wife. She whispers, ‘We
have to leave here. If you want to live, we have to leave this house. Right now. You have to trust me.’

I shove her in the chest. She stumbles back. ‘Trust you?’ I shout. ‘Get away from me!’

She looks disappointed in me and, for the first time... afraid. Her eyes flit to the ceiling fan.

There is something about that fan – something evil. It is like an eye – a lazy, leering, winking eye – taking in this sordid spectacle, this final conflict between man and
wife, surely their last.

‘What are you looking at?’ I ask. ‘Why do you keep looking—’

I stop.

I go to the nightstand, grab the first thing I see with any heft – a brass bookend, cast in the shape of an elephant head, the size of a brick – a knick-knack that was in the house
when we arrived. I climb onto the bed, stand at the edge of the mattress, lean out to the fan.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

I swing the bookend with all my might against the centre of the fan. The plastic eye cracks open. The entire apparatus – teak blades, centre eye, metal mounts – is knocked from the
braces in the ceiling. It drops three inches, snags on electrical wires, then hangs limp. White plaster dust rains down. I peer into the fan’s centre. There is no mistaking what I see. In the
middle, behind what used to be smoked plastic, a camera lens stares back at me, unblinking.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ I yell. I swing the bookend again. Wires snap. The fan crashes to the floor, leaving a fine cloud of white dust hanging in the air.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ I point accusingly out of the bedroom window, through the rain, at the dark house across the street. ‘He’s the one.’

‘Jimmy, listen. Let me explain what’s going on.’

‘He’s Ghol Gedrosian,’ I say, finally understanding.

‘No, Jimmy – You’re wrong. Listen... We have to leave this house! They’re coming. They hear you.’

I ignore her. I jump from the bed, push her roughly out of my way, and run from the room, gripping the heavy metal elephant in my hand.

She calls after me, ‘Jimmy, don’t do it! They’ll kill you.’

I bound down the stairs, into the living room. Now, everywhere I look, I see hidden cameras. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room. How many times have Libby and I lain on that couch,
directly in front of it?

I peer into the clock. The glass reflects my own face: dark circles under my eyes, wet hair, the bump of my broken nose. I see no camera, but instead see an insane man filled with rage. I lift
the metal bookend and swing it at the clock face.

Glass shatters. A shard flies, missing my eye by an inch, nicks my cheek. Like a Saturday-morning cartoon, springs literally fly out of the clock. Then I see it: behind the clock hands, behind
the warped metal facing, is the dark staring eye of a camera lens.

‘Jimmy, listen to me.’ Libby has appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She glances at the bookend in my hand. ‘They’re going to kill me, now. You’ve just signed my
death warrant.’

‘Who is going to kill you?’

‘You know who.’

‘Say his name.’

She shakes her head.

I march past her, into the foyer, and out of the front door. She yells behind me, ‘Jimmy, no!’

I stomp onto the porch, and down into the rain.

I pass Libby’s Mercedes, which she parked behind my Ford. It’s askew, uneven in the driveway, parked in a hurry. She left the convertible soft-top open. Rain pours in. I keep
walking. The water pelts my scalp and face and eyelids so hard that I can barely open them enough to see. I march in a straight line, through thunder and sheets of rain, and I cross the street. In
the distance, a set of headlights cuts through the rain. I ignore them. I clomp across my neighbour’s yard, my feet sinking ankle-deep into mud.

I climb his stairs, onto his porch. On the patio, at last I’m shielded from the storm. I pound the door with the metal bookend. The sound is loud and violent, a Gestapo knock at midnight.
The metal leaves deep gouges in the wood.

‘Let me in!’ I shout. ‘Let me in!’

The door opens. My velociraptor neighbour stands there, blocking the doorframe, looking at me curiously. He wears a wife-beater undershirt. Up close, he seems lean and toned, much more muscular
than I remember, with the tapered torso of a professional athlete.

‘Yes?’ he says. ‘May I help you?’ His accent is Russian.

‘I’m your neighbour, Jim Thane,’ I say, not sounding particularly neighbourly. ‘Let me the fuck in.’ I shove him in the chest with my fist, which surprises him as
much as me, and he stumbles back and away from the door, giving me entrance.