The Doll (19 page)

Finger resting outside the trigger guard, one eye to the scope for detail, the other pulling in the surrounding picture, he waited. Had the choice been his, Lumani would have said no to the stop, would have kept the convoy moving across the border and through Italy as quickly as possible. It was Uncle’s insistence upon maintaining doll-like perfection to fulfill the wishes of an exacting client that granted this pause—a decision that ignored the inevitability of an escape attempt.

And why not? What had Uncle to lose? Lumani was on location to ensure a job well done: here to clean up whatever mess this lack of reason caused. And as always, Lumani would bear responsibility for whatever failure might spawn from the decisions of a man who took success for granted and punished for infractions that were inconsequential.

Inside the car, the Michael woman tossed the blanket to the backseat, and in anticipation of what would follow, Lumani’s tension mounted, slow and steady, into low-grade anxiety, thick and sticky, coating each thought and pasting his gut. Against this he controlled his breathing and pulled into the focus of the moment.

She opened the driver’s door. Put foot to pavement and turned back to the interior. Through Lumani’s headpiece her voice was clear. “Don’t move,” she said. “Not a muscle, until I open your door.”

The high-powered magnification allowed him to run along the contours of her body. He spotted the outline of the phone in her rear pocket, car keys in her hand, and although he would never be certain, it appeared she’d left all the documents inside the car, which was good. She was planning to return to the vehicle, and this meant one less uncertainty accounted for.

The Michael woman opened the passenger door, cut the tape at the doll girl’s wrists, took her hand, and pulled her upward. Once the girl was standing, she wrapped an arm around her shoulders, every bit the protective boyfriend to his sickly girlfriend: a smooth strategy as far as controlling a package without drawing attention was concerned.

Together, stride linked to stride, they walked toward the rear of the building. Lumani angled, following with the rifle, waiting for the first indication that the Michael woman had chosen wrong. He’d not yet had to kill a driver before job completion and preferred this high-risk delivery not to be the first to force him to deliver the merchandise in the driver’s place.

Halfway to the building, she stopped and, with her arm still tight around the doll girl’s shoulders, turned so that they both faced in his direction, and with her mouth moving slightly, spoke words too low for the cell phone in her pocket to pick up. The doll girl looked up at his perch and, he could have sworn, directly at him.

Lumani froze. Movement, any movement, would only confirm what their eyesight might doubt. And then subtle, or perhaps not, the Michael woman nodded in his direction, as if affirming she understood, but more, that she accepted and approved. Against instinct, against reason and a life of service and training, against hatred and jealousy of this woman, thief of Uncle’s smiles, he was pulled like a rope into the warmth of that acceptance and approval.

And as quickly as it had come, the warmth was gone.

She turned the girl, and with their backs to Lumani, they continued toward the side of the building where the restroom doors were marked, where he had told her to go. Together they entered the door to a single windowless room, the door Lumani knew would be unlocked because he’d made certain of it.

He counted time, impatience growing with each long minute of disconnect. Women always took longer in the restroom, he knew that, but this long? Sound, amplified and echoing in the small tiled room, carried back as unintelligible garble. This would have to be corrected by a new rule: Phone always on and phone always
out
.

Down the block and around the corner, Arben’s car idled, waiting to follow again when the convoy started up once more.

Lumani instructed him to pull in closer.

The restroom door opened.

Lumani killed the order.

The Michael woman exited the restroom first, arm around the doll girl’s shoulders as before. Together they walked toward the car in a stride that had already become routine. Lumani waited for
them to look up again, almost begged for it, craving to be seen and accepted once more, but she pushed the doll girl forward.

And then it happened: a movement so quick Lumani only understood it in mental replay. Not the driver making a rush for freedom, but the doll girl.

She jerked.

Threw an elbow into her captor’s face.

Knocked herself free and in the second it took for the Michael woman to recover, the doll girl was already running. Away from the gas station. Picking up speed. While the Michael woman went after her, keeping up, but not gaining. The doll girl was fast.

Lumani followed with the scope. He couldn’t shoot, couldn’t damage the merchandise, not as long as she was still recoverable, and he breathed against the anxiety, the mantra of imperfection, of failure and worthlessness, all winding through his head.

The doll girl changed course, down a smaller connecting street that led away from Arben, and would soon be beyond the range of Lumani’s vantage. Lumani reversed out of position and, with the rifle slung across his back, hand-crawled across the clay tiles to another rooftop valley, and up again, to a perpendicular crest for an altered viewpoint.

The doll girl ran full out, hair flying, dress billowing, the Michael woman still several long paces behind. Lumani called Arben in for an intercept, gave the coordinates, and then the doll girl changed course again, another street, this one more populated, heading now toward a small restaurant patio, where groups of three and four had gathered to enjoy the late-day sun.

Too much attention.

If Arben closed in now, the focus would turn to Uncle’s operation. The doll girl was the driver’s problem. She would capture and control this wild animal, who, worth so much money, had caused no end of trouble. The decision was made in a half-beat of analysis, instant, decisive: strategy underscored by years of molding at Uncle’s hand, and for the second time in as many minutes, Lumani killed the order to Arben. “Let the girl run,” he said.

The doll girl was tiring. The Michael woman, motivated, was gaining, though at this rate and this speed there would be a full-on collision at the restaurant. Lumani began to descend, then hesitated.

He needed to witness this last, because Uncle would want to know all.

The restaurant patrons turned toward the motion and the noise, jaws slackening, eyes widening as the doll girl plunged toward them, yelling—in English, of course. Lumani didn’t need to hear it to know that’s what the language was—stupid Americans, so big in their world dominance that they rarely had the capacity or the need for more than one language. And yet, of course, with English so universally spoken, it would be just her luck and his misfortune that someone in the crowd of this small village would understand.

The Michael woman yelled now, too, and this Lumani could hear in spite of the muffle of clothing and the overlying thud of each step against pavement.

She yelled in Italian.

The tension in Lumani’s chest eased back slightly.

The chance of Italian being understood, here in this town so close to the border, was much better than English.

The collision happened in an instant and in slow motion.

Patrons struggled to stand, both petrified shock and wanting to get out of the way written on their faces. Chairs moved. Tables jerked. Beer and wine glasses fell, wetting clothes, distracting from and adding to the chaos.

The doll girl stumbled and collapsed onto the open patio, taking a table down with her. And the Michael woman was there beside her, fast enough to catch her and prevent her from falling completely.

The driver cradled the merchandise, held her tightly in spite of the thrashing, and spoke to the crowd clearly, calmly, above the girl’s yelling. The audience, at first frozen and horrified, began to thaw and soften. Expressions shifted. Mouths moved. She had been understood by some who translated for the others.

Space was made. Water was brought.

The doll girl still thrashed and fought and screamed in English, begging for help so loudly Lumani could hear the pleas without the bug, even from this distance; sound, if not exact words, bouncing off walls, carrying far in the relative silence. The Michael woman leaned forward and put her mouth to the doll girl’s ear, and after several seconds the flailing and the noise stopped. She stroked the
doll girl’s hair, held her tightly, whispering and consoling. Offered a glass of water that had been handed over, and then, gradually, tenderly, with the audience as accomplice, stood the doll girl upright and led her away.

The structured perfection in the midst of chaos heated Lumani’s anxiety and sweated his body, spreading another layer of emotion inside his mind and stomach, a second coating of fear and hope: He wanted those words, whatever the Michael woman had said to pull the flame out of the fire and control it as her own.

He sucked air in greedy gulps, aware now that, mesmerized by the magic, he’d been holding his breath. With the inhale came the moldy, earthy scent of old clay tiles inches from his face, an unmistakable fragrance: same smell, other rooftops, and happier memories—if memories could ever be happy—when he’d been free to roam the streets of Dubrovnik. Idle time, an anomaly in a childhood he’d otherwise spent being handed off from one training master to the next: a chance delay, which, because Uncle didn’t want him around, had meant staying with an acquaintance who didn’t much care what he did with his time.

He’d run the streets in the early-morning dark with older boys, after the city with its perpetual summer party went to sleep. They’d scaled ancient walls within the coastal fortress, hopped rooftops to slide into the Franciscan courtyard and steal forbidden fruit from trees. Lumani was younger and smaller, and the teenagers allowed him to tag along because he was also faster and more nimble. They affectionately called him “Shipak.” Pomegranate. Croat teenage humor that played off
Shiptari
, what the Albanians called themselves, and he, overjoyed at the acceptance, at having some label attached—any sense of belonging—whether real or not, had never bothered to correct them.

When the hours deepened and even the boys had gone to bed, Lumani had become one with the narrow alleys, wandering like one of the city’s many feral cats, peering into windows to observe the intricacies of nuclear families, and at other times grabbing toeholds from stone to stone to climb into upper-story households to steal from them. Those two months were the first and only time he’d understood what it was to be a child, yet even then, at nine years old, at one with the quiet in the early-morning streets, he was already an adult in a child’s body.

Lumani breathed in the clay once more, then closed down the memories.

That taste of freedom was a long time ago.

On the patio, where just a minute earlier panic had ensued, the guests reset furniture. Some returned to drinks and food, others continued in animated conversation, but all was still status quo and so Lumani skirted out of position, down and up again to where less than five minutes earlier, though it might as well have been three hours, he’d originally rested with his rifle.

He moved calmly, assuredly, to keep his breathing and pulse rate in check. The driver knew he was on the rooftop. Knew he would have had to move to follow the commotion, and if she was planning to bolt and leave the package behind, now, with the distractions and break in routine, would be that time.

He would never allow that.

She was smart. She was devious. She was talented. But not so much as he.

He raised the rifle to his shoulder for the better view and studied her face as she walked the doll girl nearer the car. Her expression shifted, as if a mask of tenderness had fallen away only to be replaced by rage and anger. By the time the two approached the gas station, her forced long-legged stride had quickened to the point that the doll girl was nearly running to keep up.

Then the driver stopped short and knelt, forcing the doll girl down with her. Picked up a shoe and handed it to the doll girl before moving on to collect the second.

Lumani noticed then that no matter that the rest of the outfit had been spared, the tights were shredded—ruined completely—large holes and lines traced from the doll girl’s soles upward. They had replacements, but that would be beside the point as far as Uncle was concerned. Failure, no matter how great or small, no matter the circumstances or what successes had come with it, was still failure.

Lumani sighed and his stomach roiled while he debated, for a half moment, withholding this detail from Uncle.

There was no point to an omission.

When Arben or Tamás reported, the truth would be made known and Lumani would suffer for his silence. Better to tell now and get it over with.

Strangely, inexplicably, he hurt, and for the first time in memory, the pain was not for himself but for another: for the Michael woman whom he both hated and from whom he’d felt acknowledgment. Hurt for the agony she would surely suffer in retribution for her failure.