When I close my eyes the pulse of Detroit comes back to me. A man’s hands on a guitar, his mouth in front of an old-fashioned condenser mic. He takes a deep breath, fills his diaphragm with air, and then his lips pucker as if he’s expecting a kiss.
Instead, a hymn escapes.
He warms up to “Amazing Grace,” and so do I. We’re singing together now and I’m in my head voice, a tone I haven’t heard out of my mouth since I was a kid in youth choir. Buck-toothed and scrappy but with a voice like a lounge singer just months away from a lung cancer diagnosis.
Those days are long gone. I’ve since found the blues to fill the space in my soul, but I remember what it was like to sing up high like that. Reaching for the cracked paint in the ceiling, then past it, too. A gospel, a prayer. Never a celebration.
But it’s a nursery rhyme that was stuck in my head while that abandoned building in Detroit burned down, while a man who’d been stalking my mother for decades included me in his death wish. He’d become obsessed with her, blamed her for ruining his life.
Are all women destined to become their mothers? Even the ones who didn’t know their mothers past childhood? For Bonnie’s sake, I hope not. My mother lived on the outskirts of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon before she fled to Canada. My father was displaced in a whole other way. An indigenous child scooped up in the sixties, taken from his community and his culture just as sure as my mother left hers.
I have never had a home or good memory of family, other than a sister who doesn’t speak to me.
Poor Bonnie. She can do better, even if I can’t.
I’m sitting in the dark, feeling persecuted. If I hear Chopin again, I’ll smash something against a wall. I put on some Leon Bridges instead. He’s singing now about coming home. About wanting to be around. Hell, I want that, too. It’s not only the people who have sweethearts waiting for them at the door, holding an aperitif and wearing nothing but a silk robe, who deserve a peaceful homecoming of some sort. People like me, the ones with terrible luck, who don’t own a scrap of silk and make poor life decisions—we deserve some semblance of home, too. We may have nothing but horny dogs who wait for us to do their bidding, but our lives must mean something.
Maybe this is what I’m fighting to stay alive for.
In my imagination the city has turned against me, so I close Leo’s curtains and sit with my back against the wall. The neon lights still shine through. Whisper understands my mood. She comes over to me and forces her ears into my hands. I massage behind them until she falls asleep on my lap, her deep snores lulling me into a state of tranquility.
When I get to the office the next morning, I’m careful to linger outside for some time, to make sure no one is watching, then use the back entrance. Whisper goes ahead of me into the office Brazuca shares with Stevie Warsame.
Stevie isn’t there, but Brazuca is at his desk, staring into his computer screen.
Whisper gives him a look that neither of us seems to be able to decipher. Is it tolerance? Is it . . . affection? I think it’s acknowledgment, personally, but before I can dwell on the subject, she turns away from us both and spreads herself across the floor.
“Any more tails yesterday?” I ask.
“No. And I was paying attention.”
We mull that over. Brazuca seems well-rested. His eyes are no longer bloodshot, and when I go into the kitchen for some coffee, there’s at least half a pot left. He’s pacing himself today. I think he can handle a surprise or two, so I tell him about my conversation last night with Nolan. Before I get to Vidal, he interrupts.
“Damn it, Nora,” he says. He buries his face in his hands. “We were supposed to talk to him together.”
“Where did you go yesterday? After you dropped me off.”
He looks away, and I see now that it’s back. The ability I used to have, the one that let me figure out when people are lying, has returned in full force. Brazuca was the one man I could never read, but he has changed. He has become transparent to me. Whatever pedestal I’d put him on when he’d been my sponsor has crumbled to dust, and now here he is. Limping along with his secrets.
“You went to Nolan’s house, didn’t you?” I say.
“Yes, okay? I did. I started to doubt the tail, so I drove around for a while to clear my head, and then I found myself back on the highway.”
“And at his house.”
“He wouldn’t talk to me, though.”
It’s because he still looks like a cop, even though he isn’t anymore. He just has that face. I don’t say this, though. There’s something unbearably fragile about him right now. “You ever hear of Peter Vidal?” I say.
“I worked a security detail for him once at WIN Security. Some economic forum. Why?”
“That’s the name Nolan gave up. Said he saw Vidal with Fang, getting cozy at a restaurant.”
This gives him a pause. “Peter Vidal is rarefied company for the likes of those two.”
“Now he is. But maybe he wasn’t so high and mighty back then.” And maybe he’s still not all that high and mighty. Maybe he’s just gotten better at faking it. “According to Nolan, he married well. Though that doesn’t mean his past is clean. He was a lawyer, after all.” I decide not to tell him about the woman on the boat. He doesn’t look like he could handle it.
He puts up a hand, which tells me I might be right. “Okay, we’re doing this wrong. Vidal may have something on Fang, but the Jimmy-Fang-and-Three-Phoenix line is only one part of getting to Dao. The second has to be Dao himself.”
“All we know is he’s connected, worked for Ray Zhang. I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t think it was relevant, but he was having an affair with Jia Zhang.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I saw them together on Vancouver Island. The night I went to get Bonnie. They were definitely intimate.”
He meets my eyes briefly, then clears his throat and shuffles some papers on the desk. “Okay.”
“Rumor has it he was a mercenary of some sort, but who is he? Where was he born? What was his life before Zhang?”
“Exactly. And if he went into hiding, we need to know where he would feel most comfortable.”
“All we’ve ever known about him is a single name,” I say, because this has bothered me for a long time.
“We need to look at this like someone hired us to do it. Except you’re the client and, Nora, you’re too close to Dao. I think you should take Three Phoenix and Vidal. I’ll see what I can come up with on my end.”
“Okay,” I say.
He blinks. “Okay?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s a good idea.”
He frowns. “I know.”
He’s unsure about this drastic turn of events, that I’m agreeing with him, but since it’s what he wants he lets it go.
The only lead to Dao is Three Phoenix and, now, Peter Vidal. But to pursue it, I need Brazuca and his shaky nerves out of the way.
He may never know it, but it’s better this way. For him.