1 #6
“Why? Aside from the fact that you need a new job, obviously.”
“I’ve always been drawn to the idea of detective work,” Ari said. “Ever since I was a kid. I know that makes me sound na?ve.”
“So much of the job is waiting. Waiting, following, observing. Are you patient?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Can you give me an example of your patience?”
“I served eighteen years in a federal prison and I didn’t lose my mind,” Ari said.
“That is eighteen years of waiting patiently.” There was a time when she would have gone to any length to avoid revealing her prison record to a potential employer, but she felt that that world and its rules had fallen away.
It wasn’t clear to her what would either win or lose the job, and therefore it was possible to say anything.
“That’s a reasonable qualification. Did some time myself once.” He extended a hand. “Eduardo Harris.”
“Ari Smith.” She came up with the surname at that moment.
He asked, “Was it a violent crime?”
“I wasn’t the one committing the violence,” Ari said.
2
A year later, in a parking lot five miles from the office, Ari was sitting in her car with a camera.
She had been waiting here for forty minutes, behind a massive development that was both a mall and a village.
The shops and condos were mostly hidden from the parking lot, which was framed on one side by a sheer concrete wall—the back of a department store, with loading docks located some distance away—and otherwise the view was of the kind of exurban hinterland that isn’t really anywhere or anything in particular: an overgrown meadow that was seemingly no one’s responsibility, an expressway, the building-block shapes of a housing development and a prison for juvenile offenders in the near distance.
But these were the golden minutes just before sunset, and the parking lot was awash in the kind of light that lent an undeserved beauty to the scene.
In the distance, the beige rectangle of the children’s prison was warm and benign.
She was taking pictures of another woman, a retail manager named Nico, who was oblivious in her own car some distance away.
Nico was a very thin woman with a platinum blond buzz cut, who dressed entirely in black, wore utilitarian glasses, and never smiled.
Nico’s husband was Eduardo’s cousin, and the husband was certain that Nico was having an affair.
He was so certain that he’d come to the RE/MAX office, which was irritating.
Eduardo had called her over, told her that he’d like her to surveil Nico for a week as a favour to his cousin.
Ari preferred to avoid face-to-face meetings whenever possible, because by this point in her life she’d met too many people and found them mostly annoying.
“Ari,” the husband said, “can I call you that?” You already did, she didn’t say.
“Of course. Ari or Ms. Smith, either’s fine.” Even after a year the surname retained a sheen of unfamiliarity, which pleased her.
“Thank you,” the husband said. “I came down here today because I am taking this entire situation very seriously, and I want to do my due diligence before I make any sudden moves.” There was fear in him. He was desperately afraid of not being taken seriously.
“Anything for family,” Eduardo said.
“Due diligence is important,” Ari said, in her best professional voice. Professionalism is not revealing your distaste for humanity. “Tell me your situation.”
“Well, it’s my wife. Nico.” Nico worked at the home store, which was a place Ari had heard of but never entered.
The store sold everything you could need for a home, the husband said.
Small appliances, furniture, towels, bedding, odds and ends.
You could pay in cash or you could barter.
Sometimes there were new things, but mostly it was used.
Nico was an excellent salesperson, really excellent, and they’d both liked that she had this job because the early shift got her home in time for dinner.
Except that lately, just in the past few weeks, she’d taken to coming home late.
“How late?” Ari asked.
“Just late enough,” the husband said cryptically.
“So are we talking midnight, one a.m., or . . . ?”
“Oh. No. Nothing like that.” He sounded offended, like he hadn’t been the one to bring up Nico’s lateness in the first place.
Nico had been coming home about an hour or two hours later than normal, almost every night, and she’d always eaten, that was the thing he found suspicious.
“I’m a good cook,” he said. “I mean, a really good cook. I went to culinary school.” He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but, well, who was she meeting for dinner?
She always said she was starving after her shift—“which is actually plausible,” he said, “the woman has the metabolism of a hummingbird”—and so she’d just grabbed something, but she never wanted to have dinner with him anymore.
One evening last week she’d come home three hours after her shift with no real explanation. She was evasive about it. There were no checkpoints around here, and there hadn’t been any serious violence in over a year. Traffic was bad but not that bad, right?
“I agree,” Ari said. “I know the store you’re talking about. It’s not a long drive. Can I ask, have you seen any behavioural changes?” This was a diplomatic way of asking whether Nico had seemed happier lately. Ari was imitating a TV show detective who followed cheating spouses as a full-time job.
“No,” the husband said, after a moment. “Same as always.”
“How would you describe her demeanour? I guess I’m asking what always means, in this case.”
“She’s reserved. I’ve always found her hard to read. I used to find that kind of hot, I mean, I appreciate a sense of mystery as much as the next guy, but . . .” He shrugged. “Sometimes mystery is exhausting.”
“Do you think she has secrets?” Ari was more interested in this woman than she would’ve expected.
“No, I know she does,” he said. “Early on, when we first started dating, we agreed not to tell each other everything. Look, it’s been a bad decade.
No one’s had an easy time. Everybody’s lost a lot.
So we were like, let’s move forward into the future together, let’s stay the fuck out of the past. No need to dwell on all that, right? ”
“Right,” Ari said. “I don’t dwell on anything.”
“Smart. But when you live with someone, you pick up intimations of past lives, you know? Just a sense you get sometimes, or they let things slip. I know she was married before,” he said.
“Somewhere long ago and far away. I don’t know where or when or to whom.
It’s none of my business. But I think, and I don’t know this, I think she may have had a kid, or maybe kids plural. In some other life.”
Here in this parking lot the following evening, Ari glanced at her watch and took refuge behind a magazine. She had taken a dozen photos, but so far Nico’s secret life appeared to consist of eating a takeout salad and reading The Economist in her car.
After some time, Nico closed her magazine, set it on the seat beside her, and got out of her car.
The last light of afternoon was fading now, the parking lot cast in a soft half-light.
Ari tensed, hand on the door latch, ready to follow, but Nico was only leaving her car to throw out her trash.
Ari didn’t move, and so made herself invisible.
She watched Nico spray air freshener into the car’s interior and then open all four windows.
Nico’s car pulled out of the lot. Ari followed.
She trailed Nico for twenty minutes, out onto the expressway and south, until Nico made a right turn into Willow Gardens, the gated community where she lived with her husband.
Cincinnati United gunmen stood on either side of the entry road.
Ari pulled over to the side of the expressway.
She wished she could keep driving. Sometimes when she first came to the Ohio Republic she’d driven with no real destination, just for the solitude and motion of driving alone, but gas was more expensive now.
She leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and tried to empty her mind of conscious thought.
She was waiting to see if something pulled at her.
Ari didn’t think of herself as having a particularly good memory.
There were years of her life that she hardly remembered, because one way to speed up time in prison is to make every day as similar as possible to the day before.
But something about Nico was bothering her.
She felt a strange certainty, improbable but impossible to ignore: she knew Nico from somewhere.
True diligence means following the improbable path.
Her favourite line from a book she’d read as a child, a story about a girl detective.
The following evening Ari was back in the same parking lot, at the same time, waiting.
She liked this line of work. This is what being a detective might have been like, she found herself thinking.
Why hadn’t she just become a detective, instead of turning to crime?
She could’ve saved herself some trouble.
It was interesting to imagine a life played out in the ranks of the NYPD.
At 7:20 p.m. Nico emerged from the employee exit at the back of the complex, carrying a takeout bag that turned out to contain a barbecue sandwich.
For an hour Nico sat in her car and did absolutely nothing of note.
She read The Economist, using her phone as a reading light.
She ate her sandwich. Sometimes she gazed through the windshield, as if considering the twilight landscape.
Ari stared at her through the viewfinder, trying to map this woman onto her life. Nothing fit, but the sense of having known her at some point was inescapable.