The apartment looked as if it had been picked up and shaken in the teeth of a monster. Slashed paintings and broken mirrors lay on the floor amid china shards. Chairs had been denuded of their legs and splats. A torn curtain dragged on the floor, stirring a little from the air wandering in from the broken window. In the haphazard destruction, it took Roman a moment to pick out her arm.
A memory emerged of a childhood enemy who had one winter unexpectedly pushed him into a deep creek – the same frozen, heavy, helpless shock. He pulled the blanket off her, moving quickly as an antidote to fear, untying the blindfold of his own sock and the scarf around her wrists. Her hands were cold, and one arm was daubed with blood. Something was hanging from the corner of her mouth, and he watched with horror as a whole nylon stocking came out when he pulled.
It was impossible to tell whether she was breathing and he put his hand between her breasts, and the frozen sensation thawed into sweat when he felt her heart beating shallowly in sleep. The vandals had left a decanter of brandy in the kitchen untouched. Roman lifted Dany’s head to pour a glass into her mouth. She choked, and he sat her up, holding her upright against his shoulder. The nearer she dared come to consciousness, the closer he held her until finally they were rocking together on the sofa in the middle of the shattered room with the night air coming through the paneless windows.
‘What a dump,’ Dany said in an imitation of Liz Taylor doing an imitation of Bette Davis. It was an hour later, and she was coming around. They were sitting on the bed, the scene of least damage. The bathroom medicine cabinet had been emptied into the tub, and the contents of the refrigerator had been emptied everywhere. She was eating a reasonably clean breakfast roll for her empty stomach.
‘How’s the arm feel?’
‘Fine. I don’t even notice it. It’ll heal in a couple of days. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know why they did it.’
She inspected the herringbone pattern of razor cuts on the inside of her forearm. Roman had painted them with iodine, a ritual that reassured her.
‘The main thing as I see it,’ she said, ‘is that we’re going to have to walk around here in shoes for a while until all the glass is picked up.’
Roman shook his head in amazement. It had taken her thirty minutes to stop crying enough to talk at first. Now she was handling it as if it were a slip on the pavement. It was a show, and he appreciated it all the more.
‘You know, I wouldn’t have even noticed the hair that was pulled out,’ she said and rubbed her head. ‘I thought it was just part of the overall headache. Does that make me a poor victim?’
‘Lousy.’ He watched the smile on her face disappear. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The reason they didn’t do anything to me. Except scare me to death. They wanted you, to kill you.’
‘Well, they missed and got you, and it’s my fault. I’m not going to leave you alone like that again. I swear. There’s a police sergeant who owes me a favor. He and I will find out who these . . . people were.’
‘No.’ Dany grabbed his arm. ‘They won’t come back. Forget about them. I’ll look through the peephole and won’t open the door without the chain on from now on. Please. If you want to do something for me, don’t do anything. You don’t know how much it scares me when you talk like that.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ He patted her knee. ‘I’ll let the cop do his job. How’s that?’
Dany was relieved. He’d never given in to her before. She threw her arms around him and kissed him.
‘Wait, wait a second. You have to tell me what to tell my friend.’ He thought the ordeal might be too upsetting to relive, but Dany had no qualms about talking, like a child who’s only afraid of the dark when he’s alone.
‘I can’t remember exactly what they said. I was too scared,’ she admitted. ‘All I know is that I think there were five of them, and I think two were men and three were women. I can’t say how big or little.’
She spoke for a long time without adding much in the way of facts. She’d been blind and terrified and usually dead to the world. One thing she felt was an impression that they had come for one thing, to get Roman, and without him they were vaguely at a loss. The destruction had been vicious and general, although there was something about china that she couldn’t remember. And the safe, they hadn’t been able to get into the safe.
When her eyelids drooped, Roman brushed the crumbs off the bed and laid her head down on the slashed pillow. He turned the lights out, and as he walked back to the bed, he dropped his clothes on the floor. This was one time when they wouldn’t make a difference. When he got into bed next to her, Dany moved her head from the pillow to his shoulder.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said sleepily. ‘Just goes to prove how dumb I am. When I woke up the first time after he held my nose, I kept thinking how hot they were in their ski masks, and how nice it would be for us to go skiing. You’ll have to take me to the White Mountains.’
She was asleep by the end of the sentence. Her hair brush-bed over Roman’s mouth. He had never been more awake.
He hadn’t told her what he found as he searched the apartment. The blood and hair had not been taken for no reason at all. They were necessary for the image, the little broken warning that he looked for as soon as he saw what they’d done to her. It wasn’t hard to find. In the wreckage, the untouched case stood out like any lone survivor. It was a small custom-designed chest about a foot high, made in Philadelphia about 1750 for the various eyeglasses of a wealthy buyer. Franklin’s bifocals were not popular yet, and the case had drawers enough for six pairs. The drawers and chest were made of cherry wood, and the inside was lined with velvet.
In the first drawer he pulled open was a tiny pink leg. He recognized it as coming from a porcelain Victorian doll in his collection. The leg had been ripped from the hinge. It was wrapped in one of Dany’s hairs and smeared with her blood. He took the other leg from the second drawer, the torso from the third, the right arm from the fourth and the left arm from the fifth. The head was in the top drawer. Each of them had been similarly tied and painted.
The callers had left another memento, probably less intentionally. The scarf they had tied Dany up with was an unusual one. It was a long, thin braid of black silk, and one end was tied around a gold four ducat with the placid profile of Franz Josef. He was not surprised that it had cut off her circulation.
He patted Dany’s sleeping, content head. It wasn’t so dumb of her to wake up thinking about skiing in the White Mountains. After all, that’s where Hillary Sloan and her friends were heading, according to the brown spotted piece of map he found next to the doll’s head. He didn’t have to accept the invitation, the doll said, but then Dany would take his place.