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ELIZABETH
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MY PHONE MADE A LOUD sound—last night I’d made sure to turn the volume up to the max—jerking me upright in bed.
Time and space disoriented for a moment (thanks to my dream), I managed to press the talk button, certain I’d hear Khalid Nouri’s voice.
It was Rick, one of my partners.
It was still dark outside. I checked the time: 6:05 in the morning.
“Rick,” I moaned, “this better be important.”
“Are you having sex, love? Have you finally used the little present I gave you when you left for Rosenthal? Please tell me there is a man in your bed.”
The present was a pack of condoms he’d tossed me just before I passed the airport gate, shouting, “Be proactive, love.” I hadn’t been. The box lay unopened in my drawer.
I yawned. “I’m alone and I was sleeping. It’s six o’clock in the morning here.”
“Well, it’s tomorrow afternoon in Japan. Sorry for waking you up, love. This is important.”
“Please continue to feel guilty. You woke me up from a hot dream.”
“Aw, that’s not good. When you have hot dreams, it means you’re not having enough sex, but tell me something I didn’t know. You’ll tell us about your dream in a bit. We have great news. An hour ago, we got a phone call from Khalid Nouri. Man, this is awesome! He wants to hire CBB Restauration. I mean, he wants you; Alain and I may join you later. In the meantime, he’ll help us to get new projects through his contacts and business associates. He really likes what you’ve done so far.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” I said, unable to suppress a smile. “Where’s Alain?”
“Already left. Go to Skype, I want to see you.”
I jumped out of bed and sprinted to the living room. I turned on my laptop and within seconds I was looking at my partner’s excited face. He filled me in with the details of their phone conversation with Khalid Nouri.
“This can open many doors for us,” Rick said. “Rosenthal brought us luck. Since we sent you there, we’re getting job offers weekly. I had to hire subcontractors for one of them.”
“Did he mention what he’s going to do with the existing contract between Mrs. Fontaine and us?”
“He said he’ll take care of that. He’s Mrs. Fontaine’s dream investor, she won’t mind if you work for him.”
“Oh, I bet she won’t,” I said, smiling to myself. She’d all but offered me up on a silver platter already.
“Now, tell us how it’s going in Rosenthal,” Rick said.
“Exciting, now that we have an investor.” I mentioned my little research about Khalid Nouri. “He’s an interesting man. Experienced. I’m surprised I couldn’t find much about him.”
“Alain and I did our inquiry, as you asked us. Guess who happens to know Nouri? Christian Enescu—remember him? The fellow whose heart you broke a few years ago? Anyhow, Christian says he worked with Nouri on several projects. He has the highest regard for your boss.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, ignoring Rick’s little jab about our Swiss colleague, with whom I’d spent two days in Vienna buying some stained glass for one of our renovation projects. “Alain’s already forwarded me Christian’s email.”
“Oh, he did? Good. Then you know. You can trust Christian Enescu.”
I knew I could. Still. “There are other people connected to Nouri that I don’t know what to think about. They’re top doctors and lawyers, they seem rich, but they all live in two small towns in Colorado. Isn’t that strange?”
“Where are these towns?”
“Near Denver.”
“See? Not strange at all. It’s a new trend. Many professionals work in cities but reside in nearby towns.”
Only none of them worked in Denver. But then, Jack Canagan could run his company from anywhere, couldn’t he? And Astrid and Dr. Demir worked for a prestigious orthopedic clinic, according to a popular online encyclopedia. “Never mind that now. Tell me about the current projects.”
We spoke for the next twenty minutes, then wrapped it up until the next time. Rick had to go to the office and I also had a busy day ahead of me.
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I MISSED RICK AND ALAIN. They were not only my best friends but also the brothers and cousins I’d never had.
The three of us lived together. I occupied the small, one-bedroom flat on the upper floor in Rick and Alain’s house.
Like me, Rick was from Boston. We’d known each other from high school but became close friends during our university years. We both studied architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Alain had come to Boston from Montreal. We met him on the very first day of the first year. I was instantly attracted to the tall, dark and handsome Canadian.
So was Rick.
Thus had started one of the best and strongest relationships I’d ever seen.
Since Rick and I were so close, Alain accepted me as a friend. The three of us soon became inseparable. Smart and good-humored, they were well liked, but they were very private and, besides me, they didn’t have a lot of close friends.
My parents loved them both and they were frequent visitors to our place. Rick had a difficult relationship with his own parents. My mom, dad and I were kind of a surrogate family for Rick.
Alain came from a loving family: mother, father and a married brother, who owned one of the most popular nightclubs in Montreal.
After we graduated, Rick and Alain moved to Montreal and got jobs. Rick started working for a small architectural restoration company, and Alain for the Heritage Department of the City of Montreal. I went to Italy, first to Rome and then to Turin, to complete my master’s and doctoral degrees in architectural object restoration.
Not long after I came back, my parents died. First my father and then, less than nine months later, my mother. My father was eighty-seven years old. My mother, ten years his junior, had fallen ill after the funeral and simply refused to recover. She couldn’t and wouldn’t live without him.
Rick and Alain had come both times to help me get through the funeral and those first horrible days. As soon as I was done with the legal formalities, I found tenants for my house and moved to Montreal.
I rented a flat close to the city center. Before I had time to seriously look for a job, Rick and Alain came up with the idea of opening our own company for object renovations. Rick and I had some savings; Alain’s parents and brother had lent him the rest. The regulars from the nightclub, many of them either Alain’s or his brother’s acquaintances, had done lots of volunteer work, from painting, plumbing and cleaning to legal stuff, and voila! CBB Restauration had been born. Until recently, we had had enough jobs to provide us with a decent standard of living.
I liked Montreal. I had my own company with my best friends as my partners. I formed a couple of new friendships and found an adopted family in Alain’s.
And then I met Dennis Simmons.
Dennis was the thirty-something owner of a luxury car dealership, good-looking and charming. He said he’d been born in a small town in the Midwest and had lost his parents when he was young. He presented himself as a self-made man, who, after running a successful car business in California, had decided to open another showroom in Montreal.
We had gone on a couple of dates, but in spite of all his charm and gallantry, I decided I didn’t like him enough to continue seeing him. For reasons I couldn’t explain, he made me nervous.
Soon I learned why. He’d become obsessed with me. He’d wait for me across the street, follow me to my apartment, and phone day and night begging me to take him back.
Take him back? It implied we had had a relationship. We hadn’t. We’d kissed a couple of times, that was it.
Rick and Alain tried to reason with him several times. It would work for a couple of days but then he would start again.
I talked to the police, they talked to him, and for a while, he behaved.
Then one night, it was mid-December a year or so ago, I’d returned to my apartment from a small Christmas party at our office. Rick walked me to my door and waited outside until I gave him a sign from the kitchen window that everything was fine.
I watched him pulling away and reached my arm to turn on the light.
A hand grabbed my wrist and twisted it so hard that my knees buckled. A hard blow to the side of my head knocked me to the floor.
“We won’t need the light, you filthy little whore! I can’t stand the sight of blood anyway.”
Then he hit me again. And again. And again. I lost count of how many blows I got. It was a miracle I hadn’t lost consciousness. Completely out of control with rage, Dennis continued hitting and kicking me, hurling his insane accusations all along.
“You’re fucking them both, you bitch! You’re a whore! Whore! You let them fuck you. Whore!”
He kept repeating that word over and over again, obviously finding some sick pleasure in saying it. Then he took a step back and started unbuckling his belt yelling, “Now I’m going to show you a good fuck you don’t even deserve!”
It will break my Mom and Dad’s hearts when I come to them, I remembered thinking as I lay helplessly on the floor, numb from pain, fighting the darkness that threatened to swallow me and wishing for it to come and end my agony. And I remembered curling up into a ball, to protect my abdomen. My babies will live here one day, I thought. I must keep my womb safe.
And then something strange happened: I felt two small hands holding mine, and I knew they were the hands of my children. A girl and a boy, tugging me to get up. They didn’t say anything, they were just smiling. “If he kills me, I’ll never see you,” I said to them. “I must live to see you, my babies. I must. If I die, I will not have you.”
What followed must’ve happened fast, since my attacker didn’t have time to react. With the last ounces of strength, I rammed my feet into Dennis’s stomach. It gave me enough time to lift myself up onto my knees. Catching ahold of the kitchen counter for support with one hand, I grabbed the French knife from its wooden holder with the other.
Gripping it around the handle, I pushed myself up on my feet and I swung my arm. I was a fencer; even semiconscious, I knew where to aim. The tip of the knife stopped right at the hollow at the base of Dennis’s neck.
“Out,” I stammered through my parched throat, pressing the knife deeper into his neck. I could feel the moment when the sharp blade cut through the skin. In the dim light of the room, I could see the widening trail of blood and smell its metallic scent.
I could slit his throat with a single movement of my hand. And I wouldn’t say I hadn’t been tempted.
Dennis Simmons had figured that out, too. The game was over.
“Get out or I’ll slaughter you like a pig!” My voice sounded strange to me—a low, painful and angry growl coming deep from my throat.
I pushed him toward the door, keeping the knife pressed on his neck. Walking backward, his eyes on me, he reached the door, opened it and ran out.
I had enough strength left in me to lock the door and phone first the police, then Rick.
The police came first and found me unconscious. They had to break down the door to enter. Rick and Alain arrived just minutes after them. I drifted in and out of consciousness, but I was able to tell the police who’d beat me up.
After that, there was only darkness. I woke up the next day in the hospital hooked onto an IV, with an oxygen mask over my face. I had a concussion, five broken ribs, one of which had punctured my lung, and my face and body were a mass of bruises.
The police arrested Dennis Simmons five days later—in the same hospital. The previous night two cleaners on their break had found him beaten to a pulp in the loading dock of a warehouse and called an ambulance. He was luckier than I was. When they brought him in, he was conscious and suffered neither a concussion nor a punctured lung.
But then, Alain and Rick knew how to thoroughly beat up a man without endangering his life.
Later, he was charged for a whole bunch of stuff, from assault causing life-threatening injuries to resisting arrest—he made quite a ruckus in the hospital when they cuffed him—to carrying an unregistered gun, among others.
Dennis Simmons was sentenced to six years in prison. The court granted me a restraining order, but I had more faith in Rick and Alain’s persuasive methods once he was out than in Simmons’s rehabilitation behind bars.
I never went back to my apartment. While I was still in the hospital, Alain’s mom and sister-in-law packed up my belongings and brought them to Alain and Rick’s house.
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SINCE THEN, I HADN’T dated. Dennis Simmons had made me wary when it came to men, but there was more to it.
Love, the great, unpredictable, exciting force of life, refused to happen to me.
Maybe because I was predictable, proper and a risk-averse girl. My life had been a straight line: a happy childhood, school, sports, books, cello. Loving parents. Traveling. Learning.
My greatest adventure was my post-graduate studies in Italy, the most exciting place in the world. But my studies, museums, architecture, libraries and archives didn’t leave me much time for anything else.
And that was fine. I didn’t think life had some big, crazy adventure for me. Not that I wouldn’t like something—or someone—to shake up my orderly, smooth world. I was afraid, however, that I simply wasn’t the type.
I’d never truly been in love. I had a few relationships, pleasant but not fulfilling. My parents had set the bar too high: their love was lasting, deep and passionate. It hadn’t faded; it hadn’t turned into more or less pleasant coexisting, as had happened with many other couples. It hadn’t lost any of its power over the years. They’d been truly happy.
I wouldn’t settle for less, but could I find such love? It wasn’t for everyone, only for a few lucky ones, like my mother and father.
Or, who knows? Maybe I’d meet someone who would make my stomach flutter and my heart skip a beat. I’d like to know how it felt.
But for the time being, my life was just perfect the way it was. I had my job, my friends, I liked being here in Rosenthal.
There was no room for a man in it, hot dreams or not.
I showered and dried my hair. While I was making myself coffee and breakfast, I came up with a plan for how to discreetly inspect the Baker Block buildings for Khalid Nouri.