This Much Is True (44 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Linc ~ The lies we’ve told

A
lmost twelve hours later after Kimberley’s first phone call, I continue to stare at the ceiling patterns and the shadows being made by this four-by-six-inch window at the top of the wall. This little window serves as the only light source and not much else. It’s small enough to put your hand though, but no other part would fit; and yet, I’ve begun to wonder how many poor souls have tried to escape through that small space just to have the chance to break out of here. To be free.

For the first time in my life, I have an acute understanding of what truly makes a man desperate.

I ate my ration of cold food—bread and potatoes—and drank questionable drinking water, hours ago. It’s still quiet. The Moscow jail sleeps, somewhat, at what I discern is nighttime. A half moon shines through that little window and tells me so. It’s 3:58 a.m., Moscow time, according to the cell phone. If Kimberley’s true to her word, that phone should go off in two minutes. I close my eyes for a brief moment and calculate that the guard came by less than a half-hour ago, and that gives me twenty minutes before I have to start worrying about his next security round. This whole situation is crazy on so many levels that I cannot reconcile it in my mind anymore.
It is what it is. This is all that is left.

The cell phone flashes at me on silent ring. I sit up straighter and take the call.
“Tally’s here,” Kimberley says without preamble. “We talked briefly with her and Rob on the ride from the airport. Then they met up with her right away in the lobby, and I overheard one of the detectives say something about
interrogating
her.” Kimberley voice breaks down at the last part.

“What do you mean they’re
interrogating
her? She’s just supposed to give a statement.”

“That’s not what they said.” Kimberley sounds scared. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call if I learn more.”

“Kimberley?”

She doesn’t answer. She’s already gone.

I get a reprieve of a mere sixty seconds before the whistling in the next cell starts up. I manage to slip the cell phone in my right hip pocket just before the guard shines a flashlight in my face.

“Presley. Get up. You get to
watch,
” the guard says. His English is so broken; it’s as if he’s practiced it just long enough to scare the hell out of me with the harsh way he’s said it.

People snarl and growl in the movies. But here? At the Moscow jail? That’s what they do in real life practically every minute of every day.

I’m taken into a room with a two-way mirror that seems to take up one whole wall. In the next room, I see Tally. She sits stiffly in a chair at a weird angle and leans to her right more than her left. Her hair’s messed up, and it hangs in wisps around her pale, withdrawn face. There’s a thin film of sweat along the top of her forehead as if she has a fever. Even from twenty feet away I can tell that her eyes are bloodshot. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. She’s drawn her arm across her left side as if she’s in pain. The guard with me smirks as he brazenly gazes over at Tally through the two-way mirror into the next room.

“A nice piece of…how you say? A nice piece of
ass
.” He gestures towards Tally. “No?” he asks.

I ignore him, and for doing so, he pushes me down hard into the wooden chair staged next to the window.

“Watch,” he says in my ear and then steps away from me and starts to laugh. It’s a Russian chortle of sorts.

I still attempt to ignore him and remind myself that I’m at least four inches taller than him, even though he has a weapon secured at his belt that he strokes with his right hand every so often.
An intimidating tactic? Most likely. Is it working? A little.

I’m a baseball player. My day-to-day worries consist of achieving the best stats and the most strikeouts and accruing more wins than losses in baseball and not getting hit by a wayward ball that sometimes flies out toward the pitcher’s mound and, invariably, my face. Hell, I do commercial ads for Calvin Klein Underwear in the off-season. I don’t shoot people. And they don’t shoot me.

I can outrun him. Sure. But can I overtake him? Him and his firearm? Not likely.

Get it together. Breathe. This will all soon be over.

Four Russian guys dressed in a variety of dark suits—ranging from almost charcoal black to pale grey—come into the room and stare at Tally without saying anything to her. All four pairs of eyes convey little sympathy for her. After a few more minutes of complete silence, it dawns on me that none of them must speak English. They must be waiting for someone who does.

The door opens, and the single token female officer enters the room. She stands to one side, as if she will have nothing to do with meeting, but then opens her mouth and speaks in near-perfect English. She is all business, not a time-waster, this one. I flinch at her harsh tone, which cracks like a whip into the silent room. Even Tally seems to startle awake from her stupor. I don’t think Tally had yet experienced the gravity of the situation until that very moment when the Russian female cop started talking to her. Tally’s mouth is half-open as the woman with dark spiky hair starts to speak to her. This Russian cop is angular and edgy and in motion all the time. I’m reminded of Nika. Nika angry. Nika vindictive. This woman seems to be the same way. I inwardly cringe for Tally.

For her part, Tally seems to have trouble tracking what the woman is saying to her. I watch Tally visibly shudder and take a deep breath and seemingly hold onto it. She closes her eyes for a few seconds as if to steady herself and seek out some kind of balance. The female cop grabs Tally by the chin and yells at her to keep her eyes open and listen. The other cops appear surprised by the woman’s unexpected viciousness toward Tally. They shift uncomfortably from their various stoic positions around the room in concerted effort.

I get up from my chair and go toward the window that separates us as if I can somehow get to her. My guard forcibly guides me back to the chair away from the window and Tally.

Meanwhile, this lady cop is all over the place. Tally just stares at her after the woman successfully fires off questions in quick succession not really even waiting for her to answer.

“For the record, what’s your name? Age? Where do you live? What business do you have in Moscow? Who’s your employer? Why do you think you are here?”

Talia Delacourt. Twenty-one. New York City. I dance for the New York City Ballet Company which is what brought me to Moscow. I’m here to tell you what happened on the afternoon of November 2nd, twelve days ago.”

“Talia Delacourt.” The woman detective breathes each word. “You’re not married to Lincoln Presley then?”

Tally bides her time before answering, processing what must be transpiring. I hold my breath and will her to say
yes
. We have to stick together on the lies. I rack my brain in those ten seconds trying to remember if I told her that I’d told the hospital staff we were married so she could have the surgery. The guard next to me leans in and studies my face. I try not to flinch at his uninvited scrutiny while at the same time I will Tally to answer.

“Yes, we’re married. Lincoln Presley is my husband. We…we keep it a secret because...of our careers.”

I take in air slowly at an undetectable rate.

“Lincoln Presley is your husband?” The woman looks incredulous.

“Yes. We’re married. Going on three years.”

“And you have proof of this?”

“In America. Where we
live
. Yes. Our marriage certificate is in a locked safe back home.” Tally gets this little practiced smile. A star’s smile.

The Russian woman virtually growls at her. “I want to see those papers.”

“Okay. It’s a simple phone call. My lawyer can get them for you. I just want to see my husband
now
and ensure he’s okay. I want to speak to him
now
.”

“Later, comrade.” The lady cop abruptly steps back from her and seems to be reassessing the entire situation for a few moments. She gets this vexed look.

Tally looks at her in defiance easily conveying that she won’t fall easily. I try not to smile because if this wasn’t so fucking real, it would be fascinating entertainment. My anger at Tally seeps away from me all together and; in its rightful place, the love for her surges. I hang my head, ashamed at having ever doubted her.

“I want to see my husband. He had a game with the Angels here in Moscow last week. I missed it. I want to see him.
Now
.”

“Later,” the woman says. She eyes Tally intently. “Why don’t you go through the details of what happened to you the afternoon of November 2nd.”

“We, the dance company, for the most part, had a luncheon at Cafe Khachapuri. I left early and decided to walk back to the hotel.”

“Why?”

“Linc had baseball practice and I thought a walk would do me some good. I dance all the time. I’ve hardly seen Moscow at all and hardly spent any quality time with my husband.” She carefully slides her chair back from the table and gives the group a cursory look as she gets up slowly, grabs her crutches, and painfully begins to pace the floor. She glances over at the female cop and gets this sad smile. “We were staying at The Savoy under my stage name
Delacourt,
so we could have some much-needed privacy.”

Tally smiles wider and inadvertently glances over at the mirror. I hold my breath. She does the same and gets this little crevice between her brow lines and stares harder at the mirror, essentially figuring out it must be two-way.

“Your story, comrade,” the lady cop prompts.

“Yes.” Tally sighs, wets her lips, and takes a deep breath. “It was early afternoon. I had the next couple of days off, and I thought I’d get some air. I knew Linc was on his way back to the hotel, after a meeting with the team and an early practice, and I just wanted to enjoy a part of Moscow, for once, even if I was on my own.”

“Not a wise choice. That neighborhood.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t know that at the time. It only dawned on me later after I passed that guy that perhaps I should have thought it through better.”

“That guy?”

“The guy who attacked me.”

“How did you meet?”

“I didn’t
meet
him. I passed him along the street after I’d been walking about fifteen minutes when I’d just begun to realize that walking alone wasn’t such a good idea. I passed him. He was going the other way. I heard the crunching of his boots along the snow, and I remember thinking, I need to get out of here. About that time, I noticed that the crunching sound from his shoes was getting closer instead of farther away from me. I didn’t have any real time to react. He grabbed me by the arms and roughly pulled me into an alley off to my right and pushed me hard up against a stone wall.” She stops pacing and subtly grips her side with her right arm. “He hit me so hard that the side of my face slammed against the wall, and I almost blacked out. I’d already started telling myself that I needed to stay conscious if I hoped to survive. Then he brought out the knife and held it to my throat.”

“So you felt threatened?” The woman detective gets this disbelieving look and shakes her head.

Tally snorts in answer and her green eyes flash. “He pushed me up against the wall of this alcove and smashed my head into the wall. I almost blacked out from the force of it, and then he whipped out a long knife and held it against my throat. So
yes
, I felt threatened, and that’s when I knew I was in serious trouble.”

One of the police detectives pours Tally a glass of water. I think that’s when the room begins to shift in her favor, except for the Russian female cop asking all the questions. That woman never wavers. She just stands there and fires relentless questions at Tally.

For her part, Tally seems to take note of that, stopping her painful-looking back and forth pacing with the crutches long enough to take a sip of the water being offered. She vaguely smiles all around at them but no one smiles back at her. That’s when I realize that she’s testing them. She’s testing to determine who is sympathetic and who is not. Eventually, she sits back down in the vacant chair designated for her and wipes at her forehead with the back of her arm.

She’s so much braver than I’ve been.
All of this has been made perfectly clear to me in the past thirty minutes since the whole interrogation started. I hold my breath just watching this unfold, feeling helpless and ashamed at having ever doubted Tally or thinking I hated her on any level. I begin to shake at my very core, as I listen to Tally listlessly recite and relive the horrible scene from two weeks before. She tells it to them like it’s some bad bedtime story, she just happens to know the ending to. Remorse fills me up because of the doubt I experienced earlier about questioning my love of this girl. I run my hands through my hair in growing apprehension as I begin to grasp that what I’ve been going through is nothing compared to what Tally’s been put through.

I’m a jerk.

We’re back to that.

I don’t even deserve her
.

“So, he has a knife to your throat. What did you do?”

“I tried not to panic. I felt woozy, outside of myself. My head hurt like hell. I knew I only had so much time. He unzipped his pants and he took the knife and cut down the center of my clothes—my coat, my blouse, my skirt. It all started to fall away. We ended up on the ground. He was pushing his way inside.” She stops talking and then suddenly gasps at the air, pushing her chair back with such force that when she suddenly comes to a stand both the chair and her crutches clatter with a loud crash to the cement floor. “He tried to rape me,” she says dully. I watch her as she slowly makes her way to the mirror. It’s as if she’s staring right at me. “That’s when it dawned on me that I’d seen his face. He was going to rape me. He was going to kill me. He called me Talia Delacourt. He knew I was a dancer. He
knew
who I was.”

“What?”

She turns to them. “I’d dealt with an obsessed fan last month just after we got here. There’d been a break-in in my hotel room here in Moscow, and before in Rome. The guy knew who I was. That’s why…” Tally gets this stunned look. “That’s why he stabbed me in the side and in the top of my foot. He
knew
I was a dancer. He was going to rape me and then kill me or at least take away my livelihood and ensure I would never dance again.” She turns back to the mirror and to me. “I’m sorry,” she says with an imperceptible shake of her head. “Thank you, Elvis,” she whispers this like a prayer.

I’m up at the window begging her to forgive me, for doubting her, even as she turns away. But then, the guard puts handcuffs on me in the next. He warns me to shut up and slams me down so hard into the chair again that when my head slams against the back of it, the wood splinters.