CHAPTER 28
Driving at breakneck speed, they were at the hotel within the half hour.
As they raced down the street toward it, Grace jerked forward in her seat and peered upwards. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “It’s on fire!”
“Incendiary bomb,” Jasha replied matter-of-factly, gunning the engine across the open parking lot. “Only top floor.”
Grace glanced at Brenna. She looked equally unconcerned. “We get shelled all the time. Preferentially, even. There’re no guests above the fifth floor, nothing left to burn up there. Anyway, the hotel has a fire crew and emergency water if it gets bad. Meantime, it’s free heat.”
The Golf shot down the parking garage ramp, made a screeching turn, and stopped just short of the wall. Jasha turned the key and pocketed it.
Upstairs, a pall of smoke drifted through the lobby, but otherwise it was business as usual.
Jasha said he was heading off to check in with Liberation, the city newspaper, in case there was anything he could contribute. Before going, though, he wordlessly held his hand out to Brenna.
She put the camera and the gear bag into it. “Give Louie the memory cards, would you? From the micro-DVR, too, don’t forget. Satellite to EBS, attention Sam Chisolm. I’ll get everything back from you tomorrow morning.”
Jasha nodded. “Goodnight,” he said to them both, and headed toward one of the high-tech shanties lining the lobby walls.
Grace gave Brenna a nod and turned toward the front desk. She still hadn’t picked up her key, for all the use she was getting out of the room.
“Wait,” Brenna said. “Dinner. You’ve scarcely eaten all day.”
“I’ll have something sent to my room.” Astonishingly, the hotel still offered room service.
“Have dinner with me.”
“I’ve had enough of this day, Brenna.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Work can wait ’til morning.”
“It isn’t about work.”
Grace’s shoulders dropped. Brenna wanted to talk about the fiasco in the stairwell.
“Please, Grace.”
“Look.” Her patience frayed. “It was a mistake, all right? It never should have happened and it won’t happen again. Do we really need a whole dinner hour to say that?”
“I have feelings too,” Brenna said quietly. “And those aren’t them.”
The Kav?ak Holiday Inn originally operated two south-facing restaurants off its lobby, but after the siege began and river views became lethal, they were closed.
Now guests were served in a windowless former conference room located on the mezzanine.
The room contained a couple dozen tables dressed with shabby linens, and—proof of the hotel’s determination to carry on as usual—a pianist was playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Across the flickering candle from her, Grace looked exhausted.
Lacing her fingers in her lap, Brenna curbed the impulse to fiddle with her silverware. She’d been emotionally numb for three years, bizarrely comforted by her lack of feelings. And now, with the stealth of a sunrise, this quietly extraordinary woman had opened a rift in her.
The waiter arrived, greeted her by name, and began describing the evening’s fare.
She cut him off. “Just bring two specials and bottled water,” she said in Kav?ak.
He left and, belatedly, she realized she hadn’t given Grace a chance to consider other options.
She was already making a mess of things.
“I’m sorry. I just ordered the nightly special. Do you want something different?” Not that there was an extensive menu.
Grace shrugged. “Whatever.” She was so quiet, so guarded.
Brenna had no idea what to say. She knew she owed her an explanation, which meant talking about Ari. But that was complicated. Not just because of the photo and the Pulitzer that followed it, but because he had been so dear to her, and she was so conflicted about him.
She’d never spoken to anyone, not even Luc, about her last minutes with Ari—and still, the whole world held an opinion about what she’d done.
Grace would be no different. Most people characterized Ari as no more than a plaything to her, another lover in a long string of lovers.
People whispered that she took advantage of his death to increase her fame and snag herself a Pulitzer.
She hadn’t submitted her photo to the prize committee—her editor had done that.
And when she’d been awarded the Pulitzer, she’d donated the prize money to a peace foundation in Israel.
When she’d tried to explain the truth to Rachel, Ari’s foster niece, Rachel condemned her for exposing him to ridicule.
Ari was a career soldier. He had dedicated his life to his country’s security, she said.
And now his enemies would mock a great warrior for having died with his pants open.
If Brenna hadn’t taken the picture, that vulnerability would have remained in the family and Ari would not have been subject to ridicule by his enemies.
That much was true.
As much as Brenna hated Ari’s profession, she understood his underlying convictions.
All of his extended family had been extirpated in concentration camps.
He was determined never to allow such a thing to happen again.
She respected his willingness to protect other people’s families.
His work had defined him, and he believed it to be honorable.
A photo that portrayed a fragile warrior betrayed that. Or so Rachel and half the world believed.
What Brenna didn’t know was whether the truth was ever wrong. Neither did she know if the message of human fragility would have been better understood, had the photograph been taken by anyone but her.
The waiter returned and set their plates down.
Grace looked at her dinner and her face fell. Mackerel and feta cheese. UN rations.
“Eat anyway,” Brenna said. “It’s what there is.” They were hungry and there were no alternatives. Everyone in Kav?ak was complicit.
Grace reluctantly picked up her fork.
They ate in silence.
When the waiter came to clear away the plates, Brenna signed the bill, and asked in Kav?ak that he give them time alone.
“I’m sorry about today,” she told Grace softly. “I wish I could undo the hurt I caused you.”
Grace turned a spoon between her fingers.
Great. Brenna could have said that in the lobby. She began again. “You remember that woman in the market yesterday? Not the one who was raped. The one you didn’t want me to tape?”
“Could I ever forget her, Brenna?”
She lifted a shoulder, let it fall in a half-hearted shrug. “Three years ago, that was me, wailing like that.”
Her mind drifted back. Ari worked covertly. He disappeared for days or even weeks at a time, never revealing where he had been or what he had done. When he returned home he was often conflicted, half-mad. She helped him tame those feelings, usually with intense sex that rooted him in her love again.
The last night they were together, a military bus dropped him at the stop near their apartment.
Ari had called ahead, asking her to meet him.
She walked the few blocks over, and was at the stop when the bus rolled up.
He looked wild that night, crazed by whatever he had participated in.
He needed her desperately, couldn’t wait to get home, and pulled her into a doorway.
It wasn’t their first time doing that, and she didn’t put him off.
She let him lift her skirt and forge the connection he so urgently needed.
Grace shifted in her chair, waiting for her to continue.
“It was in Tel Aviv,” she added, laying out the rest of the pieces that Grace needed, to connect the dots. “I wailed over an Israeli Colonel who was killed by a car bomb.”
Grace’s brows furrowed, considering the information. “The man in the Pulitzer?”
“Ari,” she corrected. “He had a name. Ari Rosen.”
Grace’s head came up. “Is it true that—just before—you two were…”
“Yes.”
She took her eyeglasses off and rubbed her eyes.
“I… Well, with you, today… it was my first time with anyone since that night.”
“So it was some sort of flashback.”
“I knew I was with you. I was just—” Remembering how my heart used to feel.
Grace replaced her glasses. “I see.”
But she didn’t. “He wasn’t just some guy, Grace. He was my husband.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You were married?”
The incredulity stung. No one ever pictured her as the faithful type, capable of being a devoted life mate.
They only saw her as a wanton woman, having her way with whichever sex she wished.
Which, admittedly, had been true in her youth.
“We married privately, kept it to a small circle.”
She didn’t even tell her father. Her brother James and his partner Gary were the only members of her family she’d invited to the ceremony. “I was deeply in love with him.”
“So you fantasized I was him.”
“No! I thought—foolishly—that I could have the physical contact without—” She broke off. She was making it worse, sounding like she had been using Grace as a plaything.
Grace took the napkin off her lap and set it on the table. “Well. Thanks for the explanation.”
“Grace, wait!”
“What?” she demanded, impatience in her voice.
Little wonder. All Brenna had managed was to confess how much she loved someone else. “I’m trying to say that I was afraid of feeling. Anything. And yet, I was. For you.”
Tch. She heard a shift, a long, deep breath. Grace settled back in the chair. “Go on.”
“Ari taught me not to separate my heart from my body,” she said, lifting her eyes.
“He said that no matter how scared I was, I had to keep my heart open. If I couldn’t trust a lover enough to do that, then I wasn’t with the right person. Today, with you, what he said, it was just on my mind. That I needed to trust you, even if I was afraid. I’m sorry.”
Grace studied her, then her reserve broke. “This has happened so fast.” She rested a hand atop hers.
“Oho!” Geoff Garrett boomed, attracting the attention of the entire dining room. He was headed toward them, swaying dangerously, stumbling over his own feet. “Regard the couple. Holding hands. What say, Grace? Have I won the pool? Did Brenna fuck you yet?”
Brenna felt her face ignite. The piano music halted. The room fell silent.
“You’ve become a pig, Geoff.”
“But a rich pig, now. Big pot o’ money riding on that girlie’s sex life. And I believe I just won it.”
“Stop it,” Grace ordered. “At once.”
Garrett snorted defiantly, making rough sounds in his throat and nose, imitating a pig.
Brenna reeled in disgust, catching a whiff of old vomit on him.
Geoff’s noise suddenly morphed into a bubbling sound. His eyes widened with surprise. He heaved. Bright red blood spewed from his mouth.
Grace cursed and rocketed from her chair.
“No!” Brenna shouted, leaping after her. “Don’t touch him!” She grabbed her elbow and pulled her away from the convulsing man on the floor. “He has AIDS!” she said. “There’s nothing you can do. He’s been dead for a long time.”
Grace’s horrified expression told her she had gotten the point.
Brenna spun to the room. “Nobody touch him. You need gloves. You could become infected.” A waiter who had approached Geoff jumped back, out of splash zone.
Grace approached Garrett cautiously and squatted as close to him as she dared, resting her forearm on her knee. “You’ve had enough, Geoff,” she said in a calming voice. “Don’t fight it. Let go and be peaceful.”
It took Garrett three interminable minutes to die.
When it was over, the veteran journalists in the dining room picked up their forks again.
Brenna asked the waiter to beckon the concierge. While she waited, she pulled two chairs over, patted the seat next to her, and sat with Grace in quiet vigil over Garrett’s body.
“You probably can’t imagine who he started out as,” Grace said.
She shook her head. “Too much life elapsed between the man you knew and the one I did.”
“He started out so idealistically. How could such an extreme transformation happen? I mean, how can we trust our core identities if life can alter us this much?”
Brenna wasn’t sure. She just knew that idealists fell the hardest.
“What do you think happened—him bleeding out like that?”
“Esophageal varices, maybe? Alcoholics get ’em.”
Grace made a questioning gesture with her hands.
“Like varicose veins, except in the throat. They become fragile and can burst suddenly. Probably when he was making those sounds, he—”
“How do you know something like that?”
“I helped my brother James study for his medical boards. I picked up a few things.”
“So how’s that listed in the textbooks? Death by Pig Sounds?”
Brenna chuckled.
Clamping her hand over her mouth, Grace tried to smother laughter. “Oh. This is so inappropriate,” she snorted. But she lost it and all the stress of the past days fell on her and she guffawed until her sides hurt—until she dropped her head in her hands and wept.
Brenna rested her hand on the back of her neck, combing her fingers through Grace’s hair to comfort her.
“What happens to the body now?”
“I imagine they’ll put him in one of those gravesites on the side of the mountain.” Not that there’d be a rush of volunteers to handle his body and get him there.
“Is there any way I can get him back to the States? His family will need closure.”
It would require cremation, and Geoff’s remains would have to be flown out on the airlift so that could be done in Ancona. It would cost a fortune—more than Grace had left in her rapidly-dwindling cash supply.
“Who do I ask?”
“The concierge.” As Brenna spoke, the man in question, one of the few fat men in Kav?ak, waddled through the dining room entrance. She stood up. “I’ll talk to him.” Between Geoff’s winnings in the gambling pool, and a top-up from her, she could make it happen.
Grace pulled out her wallet. “I can do it.”
Brenna waved her off. “I’ll get you a better price.” No need for Grace to know she was subsidizing the transport of a man she despised. This wasn’t for Garrett, it was for Grace, to help her retain some sense of decency.
“What am I going to tell his family?”
“Tell them what you remember about Garrett before you saw him this time.” Hope they don’t call you and hear your honest voice and realize it’s all a lie.