Chapter 49 The Whole Putrid Mess
The Whole Putrid Mess
As a Secret Service agent, Naomi Templeton had operational planning abilities that were nearly Orphan level.
She’d arranged for Anca’s statement to be taken in a decommissioned admin building near the junction of Floyd Bennett Field and Barren Island, where southeast Brooklyn began to fray into spits, inlets, and tidal channels as it encountered the Atlantic.
The mass of marsh and wetland, nosed into Jamaica Bay like a horse’s head, housed scattered federal and state facilities and airfields, more defunct than active.
These included the training grounds for NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, the Service’s closest collaborator for United Nations General Assembly meetings.
This federal-state cooperation made for an easy flow of off-the-books favors.
In order for Orphan X to dodge checkpoints and stray excursionists, Templeton had cleared an unofficial route along the desolate western shoreline, onetime dumping grounds for manufacturers of glue, fish oil, and fertilizer.
The meeting would be conducted in private, the location shrouded in secrecy to ensure that Evan could accompany Anca. Though the route from Anca’s would take over an hour, Evan picked her up forty-five minutes early, leaving Candy to stand guard in the apartment.
Coasting along in the 450 EQS+, Evan glanced over at Anca in the passenger seat. She was sitting still, eyes dead ahead, purse at her feet, a tome clutched in her lap.
He had initiated the heated steering wheel and the wave massage, the rollers coaxing lumbar relaxation through leather upholstery.
The LED strips providing interior ambient light were dialed to a cobalt blue, and his RoamZone charged wirelessly on a pad at the front of the console.
The cabin felt like a cocoon—serene, cushioned, hermetically sealed.
The vehicle was a preposterous item of luxury; it felt like driving a cloud.
He enjoyed it more than he wished to admit.
In contrast, the route south through Queens was less than picturesque. Flushing and Jamaica scrolled by in a haze of graffitied stone, brick projects, and rusted overpasses. There were fast-food joints and liquor stores and strip malls with Mandarin signage crowded three stories high.
Anca began to shift in her seat with discomfort.
“What are you reading?” Evan finally asked, trying to get her to loosen her nervous system.
Her gaze remained forward. “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Of course.
He stayed on high alert, cycling his gaze between side and rearview mirrors, keeping an eye out for tails.
His trust in official channels went only as far as Naomi Templeton, extending less confidently to those colleagues she’d necessarily looped in.
He’d been taken down once already by a Service-orchestrated manhunt, bound, gagged, and hooded, and was not eager to repeat the experience.
Candy’s possible sighting of one of Anca’s attackers outside a grocery store added another reason to keep his attention at high simmer. The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
Anca’s squirming intensified. She excavated a trio of pills from various prescription bottles in her purse and swallowed them dry. Closing her eyes, she rubbed her temples. The bruising around her left eye, though faded, had feathered down through her cheek in jaundiced streaks.
“Would you mind stopping? I have to use a restroom.”
Her purse, a roomy tote, shifted between her feet. He made out a few pairs of absorbent briefs inside.
“Of course.”
He eased into a gas station, parked by the air dispenser, and walked her inside the convenience store.
He safed the single-occupancy bathroom before holding the door for her to enter.
Then he waited by a stand of powdered mini-doughnuts, offering a nod to the clerk who glanced up at him before returning to a sudoku book.
Evan spent a minute clicking through websites for transradial prosthetics, then put the RoamZone away and watched the gas pumps and passing traffic.
An East Asian woman in her sixties was struggling with the credit-card reader, poking at the tiny keypad.
A guy in the truck behind her bleated his horn at her.
“C’mon, lady!” His friend in the passenger seat rolled down his window and pounded the side panel. “Fucking move it already!”
The woman grew flustered, waving an apology, jabbing hurriedly at the keypad.
The truck had license plates and a roofing-company decal on the side with the phone number blatantly presented. The men were early thirties, out of the dangerous twenties, and they looked aggravated but not menacing.
Anca emerged.
Holding her arm gently, Evan hustled her out past the pumps, heading to the Mercedes.
“Come on, lady! Learn to read English!”
Anca halted.
Evan said, “No.”
But she pulled her arm free and walked back to the pumps, stopping before the truck’s grille. Evan hustled up behind her.
“You two!” she said.
The men’s eyebrows rose, their heads retracting barely but in concert, an inadvertently comedic effect. The driver lifted his trucker cap, scratched his head, put it back on.
Evan wanted them in the truck.
“Out of the truck,” Anca said.
They got out of the truck.
Evan wanted them far.
“Come here,” Anca said.
They came here.
“You,” Anca said to the driver. “Do you have a wife?”
“Not anymore.”
“A daughter?”
“Yes.”
Her head swiveled to the passenger. “And you?”
“No.”
“A mother?”
“Of course.”
“What would they tell you? These women. Right now. About how you are acting?”
The passenger’s lips bunched a few times. His mouth was screwed to one side and he had a permanent squint in his right eye that trembled, not speed-twitching but little-kid-tic twitching. He didn’t say anything.
Behind them at the pump, the older woman looked at them, unsure what was transpiring. Then she went back to trying to figure out the credit-card reader.
Evan made sure to stay behind Anca, receding into the background. Though Anca had captured the men’s focus, he didn’t want them to think about saving face in front of another man.
Her gaze stabbed over to the driver once more. “What if someone filmed you right now acting this way? What would your daughter say if she saw you berating this woman?”
“Don’t get canceled. Not worth it.”
“Not just that. You’re not being kind. No matter if you’re mad that she is taking long or can’t speak English. You’re not being a gentleman. You’re being a bully. Both of you. It makes you unattractive, too. It makes you look petty and weak and small. Be a gentleman. It will look better on you.”
The men shifted in their boots. Their gazes had grown uncertain. The driver chewed the inside of his cheek.
“Now help her with her credit card.” Anca gestured angrily at the pump. “Go on.”
The driver lifted his hat once more, dug at the back of his head with his nails. Then he lowered it into place and walked over toward the woman, speaking softly.
Anca glared at the passenger. “You, too.”
Sheepishly, he walked over to join his friend. At first the woman recoiled, clutching her credit card to her chest. But the driver made a calming gesture with his palm and removed his own card from his wallet as an offering.
Anca strode back to the Mercedes. Evan followed her.
As they pulled out, he saw the woman nodding her gratitude to the men. The driver pressed a palm to his chest, a show of contrition, and his friend inserted the pump into the woman’s tank.
Evan drove for a few blocks and then banked onto the Long Island Expressway. They shot past crowded clusters of gray-beige buildings, and at last signs of nature broke through, oaks and red maples rising above a wainscoting of concrete sound barriers.
“Everyone is so mad these days, they cannot hear anything,” Anca said.
“Yes.”
“Sometimes they have to be slapped.”
“Yes.”
She gave him an ungentle look. “Slapped, not shot.”
“Noted.”
He switched the seat massage to hot relaxing shoulders because why the hell not. The sound barriers gave way to lush greenery fed from the recent rains, tall grassy weeds battered by wind and six lanes of assembly-line-consistent traffic.
“You don’t have to talk so little, you know. It doesn’t make you stronger.”
He said, “Huh.”
Four point three miles passed.
“What is ‘huh’?”
“‘Huh’ is ‘huh.’”
The Gulag Archipelago was back in her lap now, across her knees like a weighted lap belt. In case the airbags failed, it would protect her with its girth and moral fortitude. “No,” she said. “You are precise. Everything is precise. ‘Huh’ is not ‘huh.’ “Huh’ is passive-aggressive.”
“You are,” Evan observed, “so Eastern European.”
Her eyes flared with fury.
Then a sea change came across her face.
“And you are so American,” she laughed. “‘Copy that.’ ‘Affirmative.’ ‘Noted.’”
His lips tensed with amusement. “Strong, silent American.”
“Boring, quiet American.” Her features were set pleasantly with the afterglow of her smile. “I am American, too.”
“Very.”
“Romanian-American. And you are?”
“An orphan. So just: American.”
She cocked her head the way she did. “Who taught you then?”
“Taught me what?”
“You were raised well. Somehow.”
“I learned what’s right,” he said, “by doing what is wrong.”
“That is such bullshit.” The curse left her mouth and her fingers touched her lips with chagrin, a Jane Austen heroine finding out Mr. Darcy had kissed one of the Misses Hurst beneath a full moon.
She seemed to be holding back a giggle. “I’m sorry.
I did not mean to say this. But really. What nonsense.
You don’t learn good by doing evil. Evil leads to more evil unless it is interrupted by something else. ”
Evan said, “Huh.”
It was the first time he’d heard her laugh in full. It was beautiful.
They flowed in and out of traffic, continuing a tactically circuitous route, until he exited, merging onto the Cross Island Parkway south. Her hands stayed clasped over the thick book, gripping it tightly.