Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (39 page)

It was better.
He
was better. It was still not like before, not like the first time when they had seemed to be moving with a single, instinctively shared purpose of grace and serenity, but at least he was taking the right steps. At least she was still with him, still securely in his hands. Her expression returned to its former state of businesslike semi-approval, and that seemed like a victory.

“
Now
we’re moving,” Alexi said, and he resumed his circling and adjusting. “Small signals,” he advised. “The gentlest pull on her waist, the lightest pressure on her hand. You can
move
her, you see? And the easier you go, the easier it becomes.”

Kevin tried to relax, tried to do everything with the barest impulse from his arms, from subtle shifts in his midsection, and of course Alexi was right. So much easier. So much more fluid.

After another five minutes Alexi called for a break. He congratulated Kevin. “You are not hopeless.”

Kevin smiled gratefully. He felt pleasantly exhausted, spent by all the focus this process required. They rested briefly, but then Alexi was up again. He put on new music. A different beat, a different dance. At which point Kevin had to start all over again, standing first on his own, then copying Alexi in the mirror, then taking tentative steps with Cristiana doing much of the work, and so on. But it all came together in the same way. He practiced it, he had it, and they moved on. To another beat and another dance. Then another, and another. And finally, when Kevin worried that he was coming to the point of asking – of
pleading
– for a rest to get some food or water or just a chance to sit down for a half hour to massage his feet, Alexi abruptly brought the lesson to an end.

“Good!” he said decisively. Kevin came to a halt, releasing Cristiana. She stepped back to join Alexi. The two Brazilians glanced at each other, and then they assessed their pupil with arms crossed, as if he were a freshly painted room.

“He can take a girl onto the floor,” Alexi declared.

Cristiana said nothing. She tapped her foot twice and shrugged. Then she took a step forward, clapped Kevin on the hip with surprising force, and gave him a little grin. “You’re too big,” she said, returning to English. “But you’ll do fine. She’ll be happy.” Her serious expression returned. “Go
easy
,” she reminded him.

“Easy,” Kevin repeated. “I promise.”

“You should get some rest now,” Alexi suggested.

“I will. And what about you?”

“I get my rest in the afternoon.”

“Sure you do.”

Alexi put up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Everybody’s busy,” he said, and he went to the back wall to turn off the music. “Everybody’s got something they have to do.”

They Fell On Him Like Dogs

Kevin thanked the two of them again, and then he walked slowly back the way he had come, around the corner and down the hall and up the stairs before emerging finally onto the street. It was bright outside, the middle of the day, and he wondered how long they had been dancing. Several hours, at least. And his legs felt heavy. Dead.

I didn’t get enough rest last night
.

He stood for a minute on the corner, enjoying the feel of the sun on his face as he let the last few hours play themselves back in his head. He could remember it all, every scene as if it were something he had read in a book, except that this was a visceral, deeply physical memory; he could feel his legs and body wanting to move, wanting to rock and shift as he lived through the music and steps again in his mind. There was silence around him now as the traffic paused for a light, and he could feel a slowdown occurring. He took in the scenery around him as if noticing it for the first time. A tired-looking dog with no collar sat on the curb nearest him, its attention fixed on three pigeons scrounging for crumbs on the sidewalk; the woman across the street was caught in the act of peering down the avenue, perhaps looking for an approaching bus; the three men crossing the street toward him were glaring at him, had their hands raised and were pointing angrily at him, why hadn’t he noticed them before, he had been thinking about dancing, they were coming right for him, and about to shout –

“Hey! You don’t
hear
me, man?”

“Get off our corner, faggot.”

“That’s
our
corner, okay?”

They were yelling separately, together, apart and as one with a single message that was clear enough, and their shouting pierced the silence and shoved the world forward. Suddenly time was moving at normal speed, at
double
speed, and Kevin was about to say yes, of course, your corner, absolutely, I’m just on my way home, when he realized that these men were not waiting for a response. Their shouts had only been a way of announcing themselves, a way to blow off steam for the five seconds necessary to get across the street, and as soon as they reached their corner, as soon as they reached this big, thick-headed guy trying to move in on their space with whatever he was pushing, they were going to show him what happened to people who didn’t respect the well-established territory lines of 120
^th
and 2
^nd
Avenue.

My mistake
, Kevin thought.

He had less than a second to move, and in that split second he thought – all appearances to the contrary – that he might actually be okay. That he was just as well prepared for these men as he had been for the kid in the delicatessen. Because a split second was all his mind needed to call up the chapter on multiple assailants from
Essential Jiu Jitsu
, page 110, and the basic techniques were obvious. You put yourself first in a defensive posture –

The lead man kicked him in the face. Kevin felt his nose crack, and the world around him seemed to explode into stars.

“Thanks for coming down low, bitch,” he heard the lead man say with a laugh. Kevin put his arms out as though preparing for a grab-and-roll-and-throw, but the men skipped around him easily, and then one of them hit him in the side with something that must have been a baseball bat. He grunted in surprised pain and toppled sideways to the ground. The three of them fell on him like dogs, punching and kicking at will. Kevin tried to draw himself into a fetal ball, but the men were accustomed to such behavior. They found his soft spots and
hammered
, it felt to him as if he were being attacked by five men, by ten, he had been thrown into a wood chipping machine and it wouldn’t stop, and all at once he found himself wondering if they meant to do more than scare him off their precious corner. Maybe it wasn’t enough that he was already down on the ground and bleeding.

Maybe they’re going to kill me.

A high, outraged voice cut through the air, a scream of anger and authority. The beating stopped abruptly. There was the sound of feet moving quickly around him, retreating, and then Kevin heard the three men begin to speak together again. Now they were pleading their case to someone. Explaining why the beating had been so necessary.

The high voice cut them off. It told them to shut the fuck up, and to take a look at what they had just done. Kevin recognized the voice. It was speaking in Portuguese.

With an effort, he opened his eyes.

“Look at what you did!” Cristiana yelled. She was still in her dancing shoes, still in her neat white t-shirt and shorts. She was also the smallest, slimmest person on the sidewalk. But her anger had made her taller. Made her larger. Her eyes blazed, and the slender cords of her neck stood out as she shouted at the three men, who stood before her with their heads hanging low. “No, look!” she yelled again. “He was in the
studio
, he was taking a
lesson
.”

The three men shrugged collectively.

He was on our corner. He’s dressed like a high-priced heroin pusher. How were we supposed to know?

Cristiana spat on the ground. Her anger was boiling over. “No, shut up!” she yelled, though the men had not said a word. “He stopped a robbery!” she cried. “At the store, you understand? At my dad’s store last night, and now you’re beating the shit out of him? Mother of God, go pick him up.
Pick him up!
”

They did. They turned and walked back to Kevin, and then they took him gently under the armpits and pulled, they pulled until he could get his feet underneath him. He gritted his teeth and endured the treatment – he would have preferred to lie there and catch his breath for a minute – and when he was finally standing up straight he tried to feel, tried to individually feel the sources of pain around his body. Looking for breaks, ruptures, ser
i
ous injuries. There was his nose, of course, which was bleeding freely. And his midsection felt as though he had been kicked several times by an ill-tempered donkey. But the rest of him was only bruised. And he was standing on his own now, though the men were watching him as if he were a poorly-constructed high-rise, one that could topple over at any minute.

All in all, he felt all right. Not much worse than he would have after a football game with exceptionally bad pass-rush coverage. Three bad sacks. Maybe four. Not the best of times, but certainly survivable.

“How are you doing?” Cristiana asked in English.

Kevin nodded. He wiped the blood from his nose, wincing at the fresh jolt of pain as he touched the broken bone there. “Been better.”

She let out a breath of air and smiled with relief. Then she gave the three men a severe look.

“Sorry,” the lead one said, and put out a hand.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

He shook hands with all three of them, a surreal experience. Then he waited a beat, unsure of what was expected of him. Surely he wasn’t supposed to thank them; they had been kicking him in the gut less than two minutes ago. And the idea of saying goodbye seemed even stranger. These were not his friends.

Cristiana solved it.

“The three of you are going to walk him back to his neighborhood,” she commanded.

They opened their mouths and tipped their heads back in silent protest, but Cristiana hissed them into submission. They sighed their acquiescence, and then the lead man held a hand out before Kevin, held it out in the direction of Kevin’s neighborhood.

Slowly, carefully, Kevin began to walk.

The men walked with him.

“Goodbye, Kevin,” Cristiana called. It was the first time she had said his name, and it gave him the push he needed. He could make it to his apartment.

“Goodbye Cristiana,” he called.

Dangerous Things

They walked for several blocks in silence, a big white man moving slowly and painfully downtown, flanked by three Brazilians with dark expressions on their faces. People on the sidewalk stopped to watch them go by, wondering at Kevin’s role in the group. He was either a new neighborhood drug lord or a soon-to-be-dead interloper. It was hard to know. He had blood on his face, but this could mean anything.