Meera Agerwal called in and told the girls in the office she was taking the rest of the day off. The flu had come back to hit her again. Her muscles ached. Her head pounded. Her body temperature was as high as the hot season in Mumbai.
This was true, although it had nothing to do with why she was going home. The afternoon was beyond insane. She didn’t usually go down to the properties, and especially not to the properties like that one. Her work could be done safely from her desk. Lateness warnings could be sent overnight mail. Eviction notices could be sent registered mail. There were a dozen people who could deliver the more serious legal documents if they had to be delivered. She had been to this particular building only once before.
The flu symptoms were making everything worse. There were two kinds of people who came to the United States from India. There were people like her brother, with degrees in tech, who wanted to take up residence in California or Colorado or Boston and just plain stay there. They brought wives and children and later brothers and sisters and parents. The extended families opened businesses. When they got a little ahead, they built temples and founded benevolent societies. Meera had to admit that this seemed to work for a lot of them. Their children did well in school and went to universities whose names were known at home. The second generation became doctors and university professors. Everywhere you looked, somebody was collecting money for a start-up.
Meera belonged to the second kind, the kind that knew it would never work for them. They came to make money until they had enough to go home and start a life for themselves. They got engaged to another Hindu of good family before they left. They did not get married until they were ready to go back to Mumbai and settle down. They did not Indian themselves up and make a display of their ethnicity. Meera owned two saris. She wore them to weddings and funerals.
It would be terrible, she thought, to die in this place.
She’d heard many things about America before she had come. What she had found had been stranger and more alien than she could ever imagine. The whole premise of the place was wrong. All men were not created equal—and what’s more, most Americans knew it. It made them completely crazy. In Mumbai, the truth was openly acknowledged. Karma itself meant that all human beings were born different, some better, some worse. You could tell who belonged to which group just by looking at them, and if they were wearing a proper caste mark you could situate them absolutely. There was one American saying Meera liked: A place for everything and everything in its place. That was exactly right. That was exactly what it was like with people, too.
In Mumbai, Meera wouldn’t think for a moment that she would have to worry about being involved in the murder of a man like Hernandez. He was a man without caste. She would not have been expected to know him. If she had known him, she would only have known him as an underling or a servant. She would not touch him because he was so obviously unclean.
She didn’t know what to think about that scene back there. The body lying on the floor. The blood and skin and bone everywhere, on all the closer surfaces. In Mumbai, there were places where the lower castes went to defecate in the open. The river and its beaches were filthy. The air was foul. That had been less disturbing to her than this thing.
There was a Hindu restaurant about three blocks from her apartment, an actual Hindu restaurant, vegetarian, that followed all the dietary rules. Most of the restaurants that called themselves “Indian” in the United States were actually Muslim, and no Muslim was a real Indian. Muslims were conquerors and collaborators with conquerors. They also ate meat.
She picked up two containers of chana dal, spiced enough to do a serious assault on her clogged sinuses. Then she walked the rest of the way to her apartment staring straight ahead. There was another thing about Americans. They all wanted to make eye contact with you. They all wanted to make your acquaintance.
When she got into the apartment, she went into the kitchen and put the two containers and her purse on the counter. Then she went back to the foyer and locked up. Her head was clear enough this time so that she forgot nothing. She did all the locks. She did all the bolts. Then she went back to the kitchen and started tea.
Here was the problem: Americans documented everything. If you went to the bank and cashed a check. If you went to the ATM and took out money. Your vital statistics and your picture went on your driver’s license, and you had to show it if you wanted to use a credit card or buy a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store. Even an eighty-year-old woman who looked her age had to show her driver’s license to buy alcohol or cigarettes. The pharmacy wanted a driver’s license before they filled your prescription. Every cell phone call you made was logged and could be traced. Every landline call you made was logged and could be traced, too. If you were ever in trouble, the police went into all these systems and found you.
Meera had taken her money out in the first six months after she arrived. It could be traced, too, but it would have to be traced back years, and she thought that was relatively safe. Nobody could use it to prove that she had taken the money out to buy what she was about to buy today. How would she have known then that she would even need it?
The water boiled and she poured it. Then she went to the counter next to the sink and took the middle metal canister from the line of them she had against the wall. The canisters all contained necessary foodstuffs. Flour. Sugar. The middle canister held red lentils.
She put the canister with the red lentils on the table. She got a clean bowl from the cabinet and put that on the table, too. Then she sat down, took the tea leaves out of the teacup, and opened up the canister with the lentils in it.
The canister was half full. She made red lentils often. They were easy.
She poured the contents into the bowl. Then she reached down and tugged against the red paper liner with the tip of her fingernail. Her fingernails were very long, meant to look like a Bollywood movie star she had had a crush on when she was in secondary school.
The liner came off, but the tug was hard. Under the liner was money: three thousand dollars in twenties, tens, and fives.
This was not the only cash Meera had hidden away. She had some at the bottom of a tin she kept in her desk in the office. That tin also had family pictures in it and a false bottom. She had some in her locker in the gym where she worked out twice a week. The locker was not very secure, but it was hers and lockable as long as she kept up her membership and she had found a way to stash the money in the bottom of it.
All in all, she had ten thousand dollars stashed away in places she could get to easily if she needed it. Even the gym was open twenty-four hours a day. None of that cash was anywhere she would have to sign for it or would be likely to be seen getting it.
Now she counted out five hundred dollars and set it aside. Taking actual money with her was always a risk. You could get robbed on the street at any moment. She’d had her purse snatched on a bus once on a perfectly placid Sunday afternoon.
She folded up the cash and then pulled her necklace up so she could get to the little pouch on the end of it. Necklaces could be snatched, too, but this one wouldn’t be. It was made of steel and not breakable, and the clasp had been welded shut.
She put the five hundred dollars in the pouch and the pouch back under her blouse. Then she looked back into the canister and smoothed out the rest of the money so that it wouldn’t give itself away by being lumpy.
She had extra canister liners in a drawer near the cooktop. She took one the right size and pulled the backing off it. Then she put the liner down in the can and tamped the edges down until they were tight. She was careful putting the lentils back in the canister. She didn’t want them to go everywhere. Then she closed up the canister and put it back in the row.
She took the new backing and the old liner and put them down the garbage disposal. Even the police would not find this. A drug-crazed hoodlum from the street wouldn’t even look.
She got up and put her purse over her shoulder. Her tea was only half finished. It was the police she had to worry about now. Now that they knew who Marta Warkowski was, they would find somebody to tell them that she had been in the office, or near it, the night she was assaulted. They would ask questions. She had not had that patch of blood cleaned up with any thoroughness. They would find it.
Meera was really too sick to go out in cold weather. Her head was fuzzy. Her mind was not alert enough so that she could be sure she wouldn’t walk right into a mugging.
But she couldn’t help it.
She needed another gun.
When Bennis Hannaford got to Donna Moradanyan’s house, she had Javier and Tommy in tow, and Tommy was carrying the bags.
“We should have dropped some of this stuff at my place,” she said, as Tommy dumped the whole pile on his mother’s kitchen table. “I went a little nuts in Ohanian’s.”
“Javier likes loukoumia,” Tommy said.
Javier looked through the bags and came up with a package wrapped in waxed paper. “Loukoumia,” he said.
Tommy took it away from him. “That’s for here,” he said. “The other package is for your house. Meet my sister, Charlie.”
Charlie was sitting in a high chair, drinking something out of a sippy cup. She had been playing with a wooden jigsaw puzzle with large pieces when they came in, but she had stopped to watch what was going on. Now she looked at Javier and said, “Hi!”
Javier said, “Hola.”
Bennis grabbed a chair and sat down. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “We’ve been pretty much everywhere. And we sat down online and ordered Javier’s backpack. Red, with ‘JHD’ on it. I didn’t know what else to do for initials.”
“She got it from L.L.Bean,” Tommy said. “I told her she shouldn’t get him anything more expensive than anybody else was going to have. She didn’t think the other stuff was strong enough.”
“You ought to be glad she didn’t get it from Vineyard Vines,” Donna said dryly.
“She got everything else from Vineyard Vines,” Tommy said. “The kid’s going to look like he belongs to the British royal family.”
“Lida came in when we were getting the loukoumia,” Bennis said. “Javier took one look at her and lit up like a Christmas tree. Then he called her ‘Señora Cookies.’ Then Lida lit up like a Christmas tree. I think the shakeout is going to be Lida and Hannah over at my house tomorrow with more boxes of cookies. And old Mrs. Ohanian gave him loukoumia from the case. And Linda Melajian put marshmallows and whipped cream in his hot chocolate. I think one of my principal worries has been put to rest. I think the street is going to adopt him.”
Tommy lifted Charlie out of her high chair. “I think Javier and I are going to take Charlie into the living room and read her some books,” he said. “You two can do whatever it is that you do.”
He grabbed Javier’s hand and shuffled the three of them off down the hall. Bennis watched Donna watch them go, a peculiar look on her face.
Donna turned back to the table. “It’s me, of course,” she said. “Charlie’s really too big for that high chair now, or any high chair. She’s too big to be carried everywhere, too. And she doesn’t like it. She’s very independent.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Bennis said. “Look, Donna, you know I love you more than I ever loved any of my own sisters. And I was very happy when you came back. But maybe you shouldn’t have.”
Donna had a cup of coffee in front of her. She tasted it and made a face. “He isn’t even Armenian,” she said. “I kept thinking that this isn’t my home. Okay, I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in the suburbs. But I came here as soon as I was finished with college. And I had Tommy here. And for God’s sake, Bennis, I married Russ here, right in Father Tibor’s church. I keep asking myself why I have to lose my home because Russ turned out to be—turned out to be—”
“Crazy?”
“Is that what he is?” Donna asked. “He still calls here, you know. I never answer the phone straight out. I let him leave messages on the machine. Maybe I should get rid of the machine, but if I did, one day I’d pick up and there he’d be.”
“You could—”
“I know. Tommy told me that, too. And Tibor. And Gregor. I could talk to the prison and they’d forbid him from making the calls. You know what the funny thing is? I think if I just told him, straight out, he’d stop making the calls all on his own. This whole thing is so odd. He’s so different, but in a lot of ways he’s so much the same. And he’s not a bully. And he’s not a stalker. And he always takes no for an answer.”
“Do you want to hear from him?” Bennis asked. “Gregor could probably arrange something.”
“I want to hear something else from him,” Donna said. “It’s always the same thing, now. It has been, ever since—ever since he shot Gregor in the face. It probably was before that, but I don’t think he used to talk about it. At least he didn’t talk about it all the time.”
“About how we’re about to be in a civil war,” Bennis said.
“The whole world is coming apart and we’re going to start shooting at each other in the streets. The whole thing is going to collapse into violence and there’s going to be blood everywhere and we have to protect ourselves. We have to get together as many resources as possible and hide ourselves because when it starts they’ll come after the women first, me, and—and Charlie. They’ll do things to Charlie I can’t even say out loud, but he says them—”
“Donna.”
“I know,” Donna said. “I know. I think that what keeps me going, the reason I don’t cut off contact, is that I’m pretty sure he means it. He isn’t putting on an act. He really believes all these things he’s saying. And he’s scared to death. It’s like one day he looked up and all the world was ugly and violent and mean. All the people except us were evil and—I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. It’s like reality just morphed around him and now he’s living in a world I don’t recognize.”
“And Tommy?”
Donna shrugged. “Tommy says he wishes I’d decorated the house for Christmas. He doesn’t mean inside, you know. We do have a little tree up and we did stockings and the rest of it last week. I just couldn’t get all that enthusiastic. No, he meant the house. The outside of the house.”
“We all miss it,” Bennis said. “You do know that, right? It used to be one of the hallmarks of Cavanaugh Street.”
“Bennis, I just can’t.”
“I know,” Bennis said. “We all understand. I’m sure Tommy understands, too.”
“I wish I understood,” Donna said. “I don’t think Cavanaugh Street is what Russ keeps describing the world as. I don’t think it ever was that way and I don’t think it is that way now. But it’s the oddest thing. Sometimes when I’m sitting by myself in the living room, it feels to me as if the world really is like that, right across the street from us, right around the corner. Maybe Russ is crazy, but maybe he isn’t. Maybe he sees things I don’t. That we don’t. Maybe the world out there really is getting to be what he says it is. Then I think that if I decorate the house, if I wrap the place up in silver tinfoil and put bows on it, it would be like a beacon. All those people out there would see it. And then—”
“Donna.”
“I know,” Donna said again. She began to look through the packages on the table, putting aside each one old Mrs. Ohanian had marked with a “D”: the loukoumia; two kinds of cheese; spice packs; mint leaves; a big pack of lamb hunks for stew.
“I start cooking sometimes and I stop in the middle of it and I can’t understand why I’m doing it,” Donna said. “We have to eat, but it seems too much, making things, using the recipes I got from the Very Old Ladies. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, putting in the effort to make us a family.”
“Well, if you don’t want to make the effort, come over to our house next week, after school starts,” Bennis said. “I’ve got Javier, and I’m putting in the effort. I’m just not very good at it, and you know how I cook. I tried yaprak sarma right before Christmas, and Gregor thought I was trying to poison him. But I want to put together a dinner thing, with lots of people from the neighborhood, a sort of coming out party for Javier as he starts school. It’s too bad we don’t have much in the way of kids that age around here now.”
“It’s New Year’s Eve in three days,” Donna said. “It hardly seems possible.”
To Bennis, Donna hardly seemed possible, but everything she could think of to do about it seemed even less possible, and on this day on Cavanaugh Street, nothing was getting fixed.
The best thing about upper management was that, if you told them something was going wrong with the tech, they believed you. They didn’t know what you were talking about. They didn’t want to know what you were talking about. They assumed that all the computers in the world were both zombies and maniacs, busily humming along making all life miserable.
It wasn’t hard to get out from under the mess that had been caused by that unpaid bill. It wasn’t even hard to fix the system to the point where the accounts were no longer sending off warning signals. Middle management wasn’t much more comfortable with the tech than upper management was, and Clare McAfee knew better than to actually talk to any of the techies who knew anything. A few of the lower-level techies knew less than she did. They were okay.
Clare herself was not okay. The day of putting out fires had been miserable, and she had spent her evening almost haunted by her memories of home. Not that Lithuania had ever felt like home to her when she was living there. Home should be a comfortable place, and a refuge. At best, Lithuania had been familiar. It was occupied territory, run by a foreign power, hostile to its own history. There were beautiful buildings in her country, but she was never allowed to go into any of them. She lived with her parents in a big cement-block building in a bigger collection of cement-block buildings. She went to school in another cement-block building. She looked at pictures of Stalin and statues of Lenin and tried to memorize tables of mathematical facts so that she could pass her examinations and go on to another cement-block building that would not be a cement-block building full of factory work. She did what she could to put one foot in front of the other. She did what she could to wait it out.
Of course, the United States didn’t feel like home to Clare, either. She’d been taught a formal English based on British school standards. Nothing was formal here. She had learned elaborate rituals of politeness that had no place in Philadelphia and probably had even less place in the smaller towns and cities outside it. People thought she was “cute.”
Then there was the money. She hadn’t realized what it would mean that you were expected to do for yourself, no matter what happened. You didn’t have to be a political liability to end up on the street here.
Clare wasn’t really worried about ending up on the street. She wasn’t even worried about going to jail, although she was sure she could be sentenced to decades for all her side businesses. What bothered her was the possibility that she could be deported. She’d looked it up when she started. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the American government had stripped a whole little cabal of people of their citizenship and sent them back to their home countries—Italian mobsters and members of the Mafia, mostly. Then they had stopped doing that and hadn’t done it since. Now there was this latest administration. Nobody knew what was coming next.
Everybody at the bank who did direct business with Cary Alder had Aldergold. The bank’s top brass was not entirely comfortable with this, but it wasn’t unusual for the management of international banks to have social dealings with their biggest customers. By now, nobody thought it was suspicious that Clare would have lunch with Cary Alder in one of Cary Alder’s special places. It could look suspicious eventually if she wasn’t careful.
Clare went to the bar at the Alder Palace. It was on the very top of the building, encased in darkened glass. It had a waterfall and a lagoon. It had taken Clare most of the morning to find out that this was where he would be, and to convince him to sit still until she got there.
She handed a piece of Aldergold to the man at the desk when she walked in. He called another man, who walked her across the wide room to the booth where Cary was sitting. The place was nearly empty. All the places that required Aldergold were always nearly empty. That was part of the point. There were no crowds. There was no waiting. There was no crush. There were just these spaces that belonged only to those of our own.
Cary looked up when Clare came to the booth. He looked at the man who had brought her and said, “The young lady is going to want a Bloody Mary.” Then he looked at Clare and said, “You should sit down. You sounded frantic on the phone.”
He did not stand up. Clare let it go. She sat down on the other side of the booth and folded her hands on its polished wood surface. A moment later, a Bloody Mary arrived, as if out of nowhere.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” Clare said. “You can’t just be accidentally hiring only men.”
“What of it?”
“It’s illegal in this country, isn’t it? They taught us that when I first came to the bank. You are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex.”
“You didn’t come here to talk to me about discrimination on the basis of sex.”
“I came here to try to pound some sense into your head,” Clare said. “You can’t do what you just did, Cary. We can set things up fifteen different ways and we can both make a lot of money, but the requirement is that you fulfill your part of the bargain. There can’t be any red flags. And you can’t disappear into thin air when there are red flags. Where have you been for the last twenty-four hours?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been home.”
“Not answering the phone,” Clare said. “Do you want to know how many times I called? The mess at the bank would have been bad enough on its own, but then I started watching the news and looking at the websites and what did I see? That woman. The one you said you’d taken care of.”
“I know.”
“So now I’ve got a mess at the bank and a murder investigation. The police in this country are not idiots. And they’re thorough. And now they say they’ve brought in that man, that Gregor Demarkian. God only knows where this is about to get to.”
Cary Alder shifted suddenly in his seat. “She’s not dead,” he said.
“Somebody’s dead,” Clare said. “It was on the news.”
“She’s only in the hospital. She’s in a coma.”
“Cary, what are you doing? You’re acting drugged. I almost had to invent an entire computer-hacking conspiracy to get myself out of that mess. And you. I was getting you out of it, too. Don’t think if this thing comes apart I’m going to sit tight with my mouth shut. If something is going wrong here, if we need to reconsider our positions and regroup, you’d better tell me now. The more time I have to cover our asses, the more likely I’ll be able to cover our asses. Don’t put me in a position where I’m scrambling to get out from under the Feds.”
“Okay.”
“Cary.”
“I already arranged for the partial payment this morning. It should have been through to your desk before you came over here.”
“The whole partial payment.”
“All of it.”
“Right now.”
“Already taken care of.”
Clare felt as if she were about to throw up. The room around her was cavernous but also too close. She had spent the last couple of days trying to talk herself out of the obvious. There was exactly one thing that could kill the two of them absolutely, without a hope in hell of either of them being able to dig their way out.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Just tell me you haven’t run out of money.”