The Seventh Floor, page 26
As a child, on walks out in the pines, Procter sometimes collected stones and sang a little counting song. At the time she had been unaware of the British version of the rhyme, and its use in the hunt for a fictional mole. As an adult she felt it fitting to put the American version to work in pursuit of a real one.
Then Gus—flash of a wry smile at the memory of his minivan and the family finances. Poor Man.
Theo, and his bottom-shelf Canadian Club: Beggar Man. She spoke louder now, confident, getting the hang of it.
Debs’s absurdly expensive Russian vodka: Thief.
Impossible. And yet it must be, because it could not be otherwise; too many facts had gathered.
Skipping Doctor, Lawyer, and Merchant, Procter hoisted her own picture atop a bottle of Sapphire, where it stared down the others.
Chief.
Procter blew a last lungful of smoke outside, shut the window, and killed the lights. The nightcap Slim went into the heap of the ashtray. She sat facing the pictures for a long while, as if in a conclave, or operational powwow—breaking bread, planning, debating, drinking. The emotional bramble here was unbearably thick. She thought of Sam, how he’d suffered, and as she slid into bed she found that made her hate herself. The sensation, unwelcome and foreign, shuddered all thought to a sudden stop, as if a stick had been plunged into the spokes of her brain. She fell asleep.
36
I-10 EAST / I-75 SOUTH / KISSIMMEE
Peter and Irene had last cast out on a long road trip in the first year of their marriage. There’d been so much of Irene bottled up, and one dark piece, quite by happenstance, had spilled out in the first months of matrimony. Peter had the date postmarked in the files of his mind: March 18 of that year. That evening he’d gone out for a casual run, only to halve his usual ten-mile route, which had him back at the house about an hour earlier than anticipated. He saw Irene when he turned into the back alley.
She’d set out the trash cans for the next morning’s pickup, and was gazing at something on the ground—she had not even noticed Peter rounding the corner. Irene’s face and neck were visibly flushed. You turn red as a fire engine when you’re horny, babe, he would say, and she’d coo back: Well, put out the fire, then. But that day the arousal he would typically experience at the sight of his wife’s flushed face was only horror. He heard something screech and saw a robin, its little legs pinned beneath his wife’s Golden Goose tennis shoes, the white ones with the pink stars that he would eventually—and clandestinely—discard. Something pulled taut inside him, made him jerk to a halt. Her shoe was twisting and turning its legs without killing the screeching bird. He had slid back out of the alley, out of sight, when he heard the stomp of a foot. The screeching stopped. Peter turned around and took off running.
An hour later, when he came home, Irene had dinner ready (overcooked burgers, fries out of a bag, salad swimming in vinaigrette—he still remembered that meal, he’d forced it all down) and they’d watched a few hours of television before reading side by side in bed. “You are quiet tonight, babe, what’s up?” she’d said, still buried in her book, and he’d fed her something about stress at work. She’d offered sex to calm his nerves, or, in retrospect, perhaps to shut him up. “I love you babe,” he’d said, “but can I take a rain check?” He punctuated that with a prudish peck on her forehead that elicited only an eye roll. He’d lain awake that night racked by the sideswiped sensation that accompanies the discovery of infidelity or abject betrayal. Was the savagery in the alley an aberration, or had something very real, and very deep, risen to the surface? What, exactly, had Irene been doing? And worst of all: Who was she, really?
Peter had thought a long road trip might create space to answer these questions. He imagined they would spend all those days together in the car, he would coax whatever this thing was right out of her, she would explain everything, show regret, remorse, repentance, whatever, and by the time they’d pulled into their driveway at the end they would be even more in love. That first road trip: Dallas to Nashville to Atlanta to Savannah to Charleston to the Outer Banks to D.C. to Chicago and back home, and when they’d bumped into their driveway he hadn’t summoned the courage to ask her one question about the incident with the robin. They’d blazed a trail of tipsy partying and frenetic sightseeing and endless chatter and sensational lovemaking across much of the eastern United States, but by the time they’d arrived home he’d decided that whatever he’d witnessed was keeping a low enough profile that he could just let it be, a benign tumor wrapped around the vital organs of their relationship. Excising it, he sensed, would kill the marriage.
On this current trip, as with the last one, Peter had fantasized about putting all manner of questions and thoughts to his wife. Namely: When can we stop? He sustained the fantasy through a short leg in North Texas, on their way to purchase an unmarked Transit van from an Amazon supplier off-loading excess inventory (under the table, of course) that he’d found through a marketplace on the dark web. Once they had loaded up the van, Peter had convinced himself that when they turned east, he would boldly put these questions to his wife. And who knew? He might bring up the robin incident. Or, god help him, Oklahoma. He would get his answers, at last.
Instead, he listened to Irene ramble. Through most of Louisiana she spoke obsessively of Russia, of her visits with her mother and father when she’d been young. She offered these stories unprompted, and he was glad to listen because he was running out of things to say. The drive turned into a kind of confessional; she was plumbing the depths of her father’s manias, as she termed it, and then veering off to tell rose-colored stories of her mother’s blintzes and cinnamon kugel and a trip from New York to Disney World when she was ten. And then for a long stretch she was quiet, she switched playlists and songs incessantly, veering chaotically between sugary American pop songs and Russian classics: Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky. She spent a good deal of time scrolling through influencer accounts on Instagram. First night they spent in New Orleans. Next day they made for Disney World.
Midmorning the day after the Disney excursion, and the bed still had not disgorged them. Peter woke first, his face smushed into Irene’s shoulder, facing the Minnie Mouse print on the back of her T-shirt, mouth dry as cotton. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and for a moment could not place where he was. On the shuffle to the bathroom he stumbled over the shopping bag they’d filled with souvenirs. He felt his foot crack one of the mugs, next the Mr. Toad Popcorn Bucket, and the bag heaved over with him as he fell, lightsaber igniting and key chains clinking and the rest of the mugs tumbling and Irene’s Minnie Mouse–printed handbag spilling across the floor. He caught himself on the footstool. Irene uttered fragments of surprise from the bed. “Oh shit, shit,” he said. His foot was throbbing. Reaching down, feeling for his feet in the blackout-shade well of the room, he touched a warm run of blood. He sat up on the footstool. Irene flicked on a light. “Babe, are you okay?”
“I stepped on one of the damn mugs.” In the light, he could see a shard of Mickey Mouse’s ear stuck in his foot. Wincing, he pried it out.
They popped THC gummies and lounged until lunchtime, scrolling their phones until both feared that if they did not move, they would succumb to the tug of afternoon naps. As they packed, Peter felt what he had anticipated: Threads of nausea were climbing his throat. Irene was eating a microwave burrito with gusto, but his was untouched on the nightstand.
“What’s wrong babe?” Irene asked, chewing on a bite. She was carefully arranging the Disney mugs in her case, wrapping them in clothes so they would not break.
“I wish we knew if there was a dog.”
The pity in her eyes made him hate himself. Heel of her hand brushing his cheek, Irene bit his lower lip and ran her tongue behind his top teeth and said, “Let me show you something, babe. For courage.”
On the laptop she navigated to one of their usual Telegram channels; they watched a video of Russian soldiers in a mad dash to clear a home somewhere in Ukraine. The camera, mounted on one soldier’s helmet, shook frenetically amid the gunshots and smoke and clamor. The Russian boys, it turned out, were all killed. The camera sizzled static. Irene shut the laptop.
“They walked in like men. No floor plan. They did their duty,” she said. “Left their wives and girlfriends back in Moscow or Piter or Novgorod or wherever and marched out from Russia’s black soil to defend her, to die in glory and honor.” She kissed him again, a feral shadow falling on her face. They gathered up the bags.
The address was a swamp. No buildings were visible on the Google Street View satellite images. The Spaniard had said there was a trailer now, though he did not know where it was parked. Peter pulled the van off the road and they peered into the rustling trees. Nothing. Irene shrugged.
They drove a quarter mile down the road until they came upon a gravel lane that plunged deeper into the bog. He stepped from the car and squinted through the tangle of palm and pine shrouding the drive. The soundtrack was a persistent whine of insects and the distant bark of a dog—though thankfully it did not come from the CIA woman’s property.
“We should go in there and see,” Irene whispered.
“We don’t know if she’s home,” Peter said, scowling.
“We’ll say we got lost. We are Amazon, after all. Wrong turn. We need to see what we’re dealing with, Peter.”
They crunched slowly down the drive and in about a mile the trees and underbrush thinned and they saw a trailer on a plot of sand overlooking the swamp.
“She’s former CIA,” he mumbled. “And she lives here.”
He kept the van idling at a distance and searched for cameras. He didn’t see any. But they had to be there, didn’t they? No sign of a dog, but it might be inside. He heard the rustle of a foil package as Irene popped loose a few pieces of spearmint gum and chewed loudly, mouth open, which she did when she was lost in thought, and which he despised. He’d told her so many times. She smacked on the gum fussing with a chipped nail.
“We’ll come back at night,” he said, and threw it in reverse.
That afternoon they checked into their hotel and drove the fifteen minutes to Gatorville. They wore their N95s, walking through the yawning plaster gator mouth that made up the park’s entrance, Peter smacking his hand on one of the teeth, absorbing it all with some measure of wonder and disgust. After saying yes, yes, of course they could pay cash, this wasn’t goddamn Disney World, the lady working the ticket booth inquired if they were from San Francisco or New York or maybe Portland, seeing as they still had the ridiculous masks on. Peter delivered the chemo (“Doctor’s orders”) story and the lady smiled and reached down to rummage inside a cabinet. After a moment she produced two masks stenciled to resemble a gator snout, wide open, teeth bared. “We’ve got plenty of these left over. You all have fun.”
They found the target starring in a wrestling show. The Spaniard had provided several dozen photos from what he had termed “the archives.” In truth, it was nearly impossible to miss the wild spray of hair, even if it was tied up under an old Cleveland Indians baseball cap. When they took their seats, she was approaching a gator from behind, finger to her lips, shushing the crowd in what Peter at first took for theater, but upon closer inspection of the woman’s countenance he believed instead to be extreme agitation. She paused, bracing herself, then leapt onto its back and fluidly wrapped her hands around its jaw. He was near enough to see that murdering the animal could not have been far from her mind. The gator whipsawed back and forth but the target held on, narrating the experience into a headset mic in a slurred jumble. The specifics were nearly impossible to make out, but the crux of it was simple: she was teeming with rage.
Irene, looking up from Instagram, had lowered her sunglasses for a better look, and her eyes spoke for them both: Moscow cares about her? We have been sent to kill this?
37
KISSIMMEE
When Procter pulled her RAV4 alongside her trailer she just sat there for a few minutes and zoned out to the comforting noise of the swamp. The smack of a bug flying into the window broke the reverie, and she went inside. Not caring if she showered—a common feeling since her return from Vegas—she stripped out of her shirt, threw it on the bed, pulled out the ashtray, and fixed herself a smoke at the banquette. She slathered Bengay across her lower back, shoulders, and arms and tried not to look at the bottles across the sill. She often avoided eye contact with the photos of her old friends, but it was typically due to anger or disbelief, not—as it was now—from the temptation for the type of drinking best done alone, without anyone watching.
She knew she should not, but she also couldn’t quite come up with any good reasons not to, so she poured herself two fingers of the blue-Sharpied Black Label (Mac: Rich Man) for company, while she did a crossword puzzle. An hour later and she’d sampled the Canadian Club (Theo: Beggar Man) and Stoli (Debs: Thief) and was ready to wave the white flag on the crossword, which, when paired with her drunkenness, had begun to make her very angry. Stubbing out her last Slim of the night, she flicked the picture off the bottle of Perrier (Gus: Poor Man) and took the water into her bedroom, where she promptly fell asleep.
That night the dream slithered back. Unwelcome and uninvited, as always, but not infrequent since Sam had visited with news of a mole.
In the dream she was in Afghanistan with her old friends, and they were all about to die, shuffling through the tick-tock window of silence after the suicide bombing but before the worst of it. They were in the house’s upper room together, making peace with their gods or themselves. There was something ordained, even ominous, about former friends, long since dispersed, finding themselves together, years later, on the far side of the world. As if such a thing could not happen without violence or tragedy. She could hear her friends’ thoughts, felt their feelings, saw, in pure bright color, their palette of emotions. She was with Gus as he considered his love for Connie and his children, his guilt as he considered death and abandoning them to life, his stoicism in the certainty there’d been no other way; she was with Theo and his desire to live though his life was so miserable, knowing that though he had a daughter, Millie was in that moment absent from his mind; she was with Mac, his thoughts of her and of Loulou, his wonderment that in death he might yet prove a hero to his father, who’d then not yet passed, and who would ultimately offer a cosmically indifferent shrug of the shoulders to his only son though he returned a bona fide Agency legend; she sailed with Debs and her bone-deep fear that all was for naught, that after this there was nothingness; she communed with Gosford, checking his Glock again and again and again, and felt his belief that he would emerge from that night a hero, so foolish, then and now, and yet somehow proven correct. She spoke to Mac as he bled out on the floor of the shed. What was he thinking? Where were her friends?
Procter woke in a pool of chilly sweat. Night was still going; an oppressive, still blanket of darkness. Thunder banged in the distance. She tossed aside the sheets, sat up, and took a few sips of the Perrier. Her room was tilting on its axis, spinning, rotating. She shut her eyes and hoped that she might be spared another dreamworld visit from her friends.
Peter and Irene changed into their flex vests in the back of the Transit van and checked the other duffels: Northman blades, pistols, ammunition. If all went well, the guns and knives would be unnecessary.
The night was moonless. On the way to the swamp a driving rain picked up, whipping water across the windshield in thick drops that were soon falling in sheets. BOGGY CREEK, a sign said, he’d missed that during the scouting run earlier in the day. They turned off the county road and rolled the van down the drive until they reached the trailer. Lightning flared across the edges of the sky. The target’s car was there: Irene matched the license plate to the numbers in the files provided by the Spaniard in Mexico. The trailer was dark.
Peter crawled into the back of the van, Irene trailing behind him. The moment—their moment—had arrived. The waiting had left a dreadful weight in his belly, but that stone was now gone, busted to bits by the freakish adrenaline smack of one very simple fact: It was all on the line. Marriage, self-worth, honor. The next half hour on the battlefield would determine what sort of man he was. Peter did not say a word because he knew if he did, he would stammer.
He checked that the ball bearing in the syringe was not kissing the electrical leads.
He turned the minute hand back on the clock—five minutes. They didn’t need more than that.
He connected the wires to the battery.
Then he shut the box and ran a line of Amazon tape across the seam.
He flung open the back doors of the van to a crash of thunder. Jumping down, he huffed the box through the rain toward the slab in front of the trailer. Irene held the umbrella in a vain attempt to shield the box from the rain. He left it on the concrete slab. There was an awning overhead, but occasional gusts of wind blew the rain sideways, soaking one side of the box.
He rang the doorbell. Then they ran back to the van.
The ringing drowned out the explosions; it punctuated Mac’s speech in her dream. She awoke, head floating, to the buzz of the doorbell. Standing, then slumping back onto the bed, then rising again, she tied up her hair and walked through the kitchen. Ping-ponged was more like it—she knocked into everything: dishwasher, banquette, walls. The patter of rain sounded on the roof. She swung open the front door, gripping the frame to keep herself upright.
Procter was looking at a large box, tilting, sliding, spinning. The world a booze-fueled gyroscope. A box. Huh. A whip of lightning brought sudden clarity to Amazon tape across the package. Thunder rolled. She hadn’t ordered anything. A gift? The thought made her laugh aloud.
Raindrops were plopping onto the box. Procter looked up into the tilting darkness and a droplet landed square in her eye. Then the volley picked up, the sky finally ready to let loose the worst of the storm.
