Slow River

“I don’t know.” I sipped, enjoying the hot, smoky taste. After taking out start-up expenses and paying Tom his share, I’d have more than thirty thousand, tax free. I could drink this stuff every day. Live in a bigger apartment. For a while. “Maybe I’ll give it to someone.” Magyar might be willing to get Paolo’s address from the records. I tried to imagine his expression when he found he was thirty thousand richer. I stared into my glass. Such a warm, welcoming color.

Spanner reached over and covered the glass with her hand. “Who?”

“What?”

“Who are you giving it to?”

Giving the money to Paolo was a stupid fantasy. It wouldn’t help him or me. But I needed to talk—and who was there but Spanner? So I told her about Paolo. About him coming to Hedon Road, about his youth, his strangeness. About his eyes, the way they seemed to open when he realized I wasn’t mocking him, that I would teach him. How young he was, and vulnerable. How he had tried to kill himself. How I felt guilty.

She sipped at her drink. “You didn’t exactly cut off his arms and legs with an axe.”

“No. But I should have done something when I could. So should my father, my mother. Willem. Everybody.” I wanted her to see, to understand. I told her about the hotel room, the judgment in the Caracas case. How, when I had heard, I had shrugged in my air-conditioned hotel room and climbed back in the shower. “But how could I have known then, when I was only sixteen?” They had just been pictures on the screen. Somewhere inside I had thought the dirt on their faces to be makeup, their anguish an act.

But Spanner wasn’t listening. “Money means so little to you that you can afford to just give it away?”

“It’s not the money.”

“Of course it’s the money!” What else is there? She was scared, I realized suddenly. Money was all she had. If I didn’t think much of that, what would I think of her?

“Spanner…”

But she was almost hissing. “You make me sick, you know that? You’re an arrogant bastard. You think the world cares what you feel. You think you can make a difference, but you can’t.”

I had never seen her scared before. It made me uneasy. Something had changed. It had always been the other way around. But I wasn’t afraid anymore. She could not make me do anything I didn’t want to do, ever again. She had rescued me, and taught me to stay alive, but I had paid and paid and paid. I had paid enough.

I think she saw that, and I think it frightened her even more. I wanted to explain to her that I wouldn’t hurt her, that I wasn’t like everyone else she knew, but I didn’t know what to say—and I wasn’t sure if it was true.

She saw my indecision. “Poor little rich girl!”

“No.” I was too tired for this. I finished my drink and stood up.

“Not anymore. I work for my living. I work hard. I do a good job. It means something.”

“Shoveling shit means something?”

“What does your job mean?” I was suddenly blazingly angry: with her, with the world that had shaped her, at myself and all the things I had done or neglected to do.

“What does it mean to you that people pay to use you like a disposable tissue? Does the money make you feel good, worthwhile, even when you can’t move because of the pain and you’re all alone because you don’t have any friends? Does it make you feel good that you might have died if this poor little rich girl hadn’t decided to take pity on you? Does it make you feel good when you wake up in the morning hating yourself because of the things you did to make a quick hundred? Does it?”

I have never seen a snake in the second before it strikes, but I think I know how it would look. It would move its head back a fraction of an inch, it would close its nictitating membranes partway, and the sunlight would slide across hard gray fangs, dry as ancient bone. And then its expression would go blank as all the muscles but those it would use to strike, to drive the venom home into soft mammalian tissue, relaxed.

But then Spanner just picked up her drink, tossed it back, and smiled.

Chapter 22

Lore is eighteen. It is her birthday, or it might be. She is sitting in a tent erected inside some kind of warehouse, or maybe it’s a barn. The smells are certainly rural rather than urban: wine and garlic and oil, the occasional hint of grass too long in the sun. The Mediterranean, perhaps, or the South of France. She wonders how they got her here from the resort; she remembers nothing after the two men drugging her in the room.

She has been inside the tent for nearly three weeks, as far as she can tell. They keep her sedated. To begin with, they put it in her food, but because she does not always eat everything, they keep getting the dose wrong. One time, they gave her so much that she slept for over two days, or so they said. Now, though, her system is so saturated that they simply hand her a pill and stand over her while she puts it meekly in her mouth and swallows. But she thinks it is probably her birthday.

The tent is empty but for a sleeping bag and a bucket.