The Insides (19 page)

She slaps her palms against the cool dank brick; she digs her fingers into the rough mortar, as though her fear might have somehow enabled her with the power to rip apart a wall, to tear a passage through stone. But it hasn’t.

She’s going to die down here. She feels certain of it. And a regret blossoms up within her, like blood in water—she regrets that she won’t see Jesse again, before she dies. That he will continue to grow up without a mother. That there is
no point yet to come
at which she will have worked her shit out enough to see him again, no future in which she and Donald have mutually worked their shit out enough to give their son the basic gift of two fucking parents. Down here, waiting to die, she suddenly understands that whatever existed between them could have been untangled with a little attention, a little effort. It wouldn’t have been that hard. And she’s going to die, knowing that.

No. No she’s not. She turns, looks back up the length of the tunnel, past Angel’s body, and there it is: the dumbwaiter. If she makes it to the dumbwaiter she can get out.

She runs. As she runs past the stairs, she takes one frightened sideward glance and sees the shooter, beginning to descend, she sees the shape of a weapon in his hand, and that’s all she has time to make out. She does not stop, she keeps running, she hears him shout
Hey
but she does not stop. She reaches the dumbwaiter and climbs in, curling up in order to fit. She grabs the control box, dangling from its length of heavy cable, holds it in her hands, and waits.
She doesn’t punch the button right away. The last thing she wants is to emerge into the kitchen while the shooter is still up there. She has to let him get closer, down into the basement. And then, when it’s time, she’ll go.

She can hear him come down another step. “Come on now,” he says, his voice carrying an accent that she can’t quite identify. “You want to cooperate.”

No I don’t
, she thinks.

He comes down another step, and pauses.
Closer
, she thinks.
Come closer, you fuck
.

She hears him mutter something, profanity she guesses, although it doesn’t sound like English. And then he descends three more steps, coming, finally, into view. He reaches Angel’s body, prods it with his boot. He takes aim at Angel’s skull with his pistol and fires a bullet into it.

Ollie must cry out because the shooter whips his head up and spots her. OK, now. She punches the button and the dumbwaiter lurches awake. For one horrible second she’s afraid that the shooter is going to turn and run back up the stairs—he hadn’t gotten as deep into the basement as she’d hoped—but instead he rushes at her, trying to catch her before she vanishes up the shaft. The gap through which he is visible closes as she ascends; she lowers her head, trying to get a good look at him as he charges closer, but she ends up with little more than an impression of menace.

It feels like it takes a long time to get up to the kitchen. The dumbwaiter is slow but it’s never in her whole life seemed this fucking slow. She sniffles. She touches her face and finds it wet with leakage, snot and tears that she hadn’t even realized were coming out of her.

At long last, she reaches the top of the shaft and she tumbles out into the kitchen, breathing hard. She has, what, seconds maybe, before the shooter comes back up from the basement. She uses these seconds. She crosses the kitchen swiftly, with determination. She reaches out toward a rack without breaking stride, without even really turning her eyes away from the basement door. Her fingers brush the handle of a cast-iron skillet and grasp. She slides the pan out as she advances, feels its heft in her hand.

This,
she thinks.
This will do
.

She presses herself against the wall, at the door’s edge. She brings the pan up to her shoulder. The sound of clambering footsteps, boot-shod, grows louder, but she makes herself wait:
until you see the whites of his eyes
, she thinks, the phrase swimming up from somewhere.

She tries to calm her breathing; she tries not to shake.

She sees the shooter’s fingers grip at the jamb.

And the moment she sees his profile emerge from the doorway, she swings.

During the month Ollie worked on Ulysses’s homestead she helped him to kill pigs, and he thought it was important to learn all the ways in which this could be done, and one method, which he’d learned from his dad, was killing them with a blow to the skull from a sledgehammer. And when she feels the pan hit the shooter’s face, when she feels the recoil drive into the palms of her hands, into her arms, that is what she remembers. It feels exactly the same.

The shooter groans tremendously and goes over backward, down the stairs, into the darkness. She stands there for a second, breathing hard, tempted to follow him down
there, finish the job, straddle his chest and pound his head with the pan until he stops kicking. But she’s not stupid. He still has his gun and in any battle between a frying pan and a gun, the gun’s going to win. So she releases the pan, lets it clang to the floor: with its utility expended it’s just extra weight. Her hands, now free, wipe frantically at her eyes: once she can see the way, she hurries to her station, gets Guychardson’s box up under her arm, grabs her messenger bag, leaves everything else. She heads to the service entrance, notices the broken lock, pushes her way out into the night, and she runs.

She wants to call the cops but first she just needs to get the fuck
away
.

She rounds the corner and nearly collides with a dark-haired woman, middle aged, just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk.

She knows she should say to this woman
You need to get out of here
. She knows she should say
There is a shooter in the building, get to safety
. But something about the way the woman just stands there, agog, staring at Ollie’s miserable wet face like the worst kind of tourist—it still manages, even in the thick of every other Goddamn thing, to just rub Ollie wrong.

“Don’t fucking look at me,” Ollie has time to spit out, before she shoulders past the woman and keeps running, down the street, around the corner, away, anywhere, away.

“Don’t fucking look at me,” says the woman to Maja, and then she flees. She has the knife, in a box shoved up under one arm. Maja does not pursue, does not engage. Instead she turns, watches the service door that Pig forced his way into, waits for him to reemerge.

He finally does, a minute later, with a pub towel clutched to his face. Even from a distance Maja can see that it’s stained with blood.

“You drive,” Pig says, his voice muffled. He flings her the keys, and she snatches them out of the air.

She doesn’t know what’s happened, but OK: she opens the car door, gets in the driver’s seat. It takes her a few seconds to find the right key and jam it in the ignition, but she does it while Pig fumbles at the door, trying to open it without dropping the towel from his left hand or the pistol from his right.

In the time that it takes him to stuff the pistol in his waistband and get in, Maja looks at the recent history of Pig’s gun.
She sees a bullet being fired and she sees the outcome: blood gushing from a man’s chest. She sees a second bullet and she sees the spatter pattern blown out of a skull. So there’s a body. She retrieves a fresh set of black gloves from her purse and she dons them. If she has to be a getaway driver fleeing the scene of a homicide she at least doesn’t want to leave incriminating prints all over the steering wheel while she’s doing it.

The desire—the need—to wear her gloves isn’t just a way to reduce the traces of herself she’ll leave behind. It’s also a way to reduce the amount of Pig’s person that she’ll pick up through her palms. Even with her gloves on, she can tell that the wheel is tacky with sugars, the residue of treats. And she absorbs an awareness of other things, too, things below the sticky surface: to take hold of this wheel, to sit in his seat and steer his car, is to feel herself in his position, to literally take on his point of view. Even with the gloves on, she begins to apprehend his appetites, to feel his stunted furies. She begins to understand the way this city looks to him: fallen, overrun with subhumans, a world soiled by the hands of inferior beings. She sees the empire that he envisions as his birthright, purged, clean. The continent that he hopes to leave to his descendants, horrifyingly purified, rising into being upon unfathomable tiers of suffering. She presses down on the gas, pulls the car out into the street, attempts to blink these visions away.

There’s no time to consider them anyway. Instead they have to run. The woman with the blade is going to be calling the cops any second now, if she hasn’t already, and police are going to be all over this block.

She makes a turn.

Pig tilts his head back as they drive, keeps the stained towel pinched to his face. When he hears the sirens, he drops it into his lap, hoping to look normal, just another passenger in the flow of nighttime Manhattan traffic, as inconspicuous as anyone.

Maja sneaks a look at him. She can’t help but speak her immediate observation aloud: “You’ve broken your nose.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he whispers savagely, as two police cruisers shriek by in the opposing lane. He works hard to keep a neutral expression on his face, but she can feel fear pouring off him like an odor. The fear of being spotted, of being caught, of getting this close to having what he wants and then fucking it up.

Once they’re safely past the police, Pig reaches up abruptly and does a thing to his nose with his hands; he makes a stifled cry of pain as he does it. Then he stretches into the backseat and retrieves his satchel, roots around in it until he has his mask back out. He lowers it down, over his face, and then he’s quiet again.

He does not ask to be taken to a hospital, and she does not offer. In the absence of any other instruction, she heads back to the motel in New Jersey. There’s nothing they can do to get any closer to the blade, not tonight: the woman who has it is going to be talking to police for who knows how long. Hours, probably. And so their only move, right now, is to wait until morning. Pig seems to understand this, or, in any case, he has fallen into a sullen silence that she reads as understanding.

Four now
, says the Archive again. Four bodies, up from three.

Yes
, Maja thinks.

That’s a lot
.

It could be more
, Maja replies.
There have been times when it’s been more. You know that. Remember Osaka. The whole boardroom
.

I haven’t forgotten,
the Archive says.
But still
.

But still what
.

But still, four is a lot for a job that’s ongoing. Where the client still doesn’t have what he wants
.

Yes, that’s true
.

Because it means there are more to come
.

More to come: at least one more, anyway: the woman. The running woman. Maja has seen people run like this before. They always do one of two things: either they keep running, or they stop somewhere to hide. It makes no difference which of these options the woman with the knife will take in the morning, Maja tells herself: either way, she will be found.

And once she’s found, she will be shot
, the Archive offers.

Yes, thank you. I understand. At least then it will be over. The killings don’t matter. All that matters is that the job ends
.

All that matters is that the job ends: this is what she tells herself, when things get ugly. Once it’s over, she can go home, where things are orderly, and she can collect the other half of her fee, and then after that there will be a long period in which she will not have to do anything. All she will need to do is remain quiet, and the record of her passage through this city will fade, and time will pass, and it will bury whatever traces connect her to these crimes, and with it, her memory of the crimes themselves will be effaced.

She can feel the camera on the bridge take a photograph of their license plate as they cross back into Jersey.

Pig doesn’t speak again until they’re back at the motel. She follows him into his room, waiting to talk with him about tomorrow’s strategy. He heads into his bathroom, and she pauses in the doorway there. Over his shoulder she can see him in the mirror; she watches him as he inspects his swollen face.

He catches her looking. He looks into her eyes in the mirror. She holds the stare.

“You saw her,” he says, after a minute.

“Who?” Maja asks, although she knows who.

“That woman. The woman who did this.”

“Yes,” Maja says, flatly.

“Well,” Pig says. “Let me just tell you.”

Maja waits.

“I’m going to enjoy killing that woman,” Pig says.

The killings don’t matter
, she tells herself again, but to hear Pig say this with such obvious relish pulls distaste out into her face. She quickly relinquishes the expression, but not so quickly that Pig fails to notice.

“You think that’s wrong?” Pig says, watching her reflection closely.

“Not wrong, exactly,” Maja says.

“Not wrong, exactly,” Pig says, with a sneer in his voice. “
Regrettable
, maybe?” He wheels around, comes toward her, contempt beginning to contort his swollen face. She keeps meeting his gaze but simultaneously she considers what objects
in the room behind her might work as a weapon. She remembers a pen on the desk, the coffeepot’s glass carafe.

“I know people like you,” Pig says. “With your
moral codes
. Let me guess what you’re thinking: the loss of life, in pursuit of a goal: always so
regrettable
. Best
avoided where possible
.”

Maja considers a set of conciliatory things she could say. Noises that might soothe this man. Making those noises would be the safest thing to do. All the same, she’s tired of being frightened of Pig. He’s not going to shoot her. He’s not going to shoot her, because he needs her. Deep down, she knows this, and she knows that he knows this as well. And so she says exactly what she’s thinking.