16. El NiÑo,Boys Will Be Boys
EL NI?O, OR BOYS WILL BE BOYS
WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was pitch-black outside and I couldn’t remember where I was.
I thought I’d heard a scream, which, given the speed my heart was racing, could have been my own, from inside a dream.
I sat up and waited to separate my subconscious from reality, gradually recalling where I was.
It all came to me in a rush: Jude, his fingers circling my neck, the immaculate, characterless guesthouse.
It sounded like the rain had calmed—the fact that I could tell as much made me finally realize the problem, that the air conditioning had cut out abruptly. That must have been what had woken me: the sudden silence.
Even with that resurgence of reality, though, for several more minutes I still had the feeling I’d just been running for my life.
Sweat clung to my skin, the white linens soaked through from perspiration.
I slid my legs out from under the duvet and rose to my feet, opening a window.
Outside the air was heavy with a tang of iron, petrichor.
My throat was dry, my tongue sitting like sandpaper in my mouth.
I pulled my jeans back on with some difficulty, looking around for something to drink, but didn’t see a glass.
I thought about going back to sleep, but I felt too awake, too bewilderingly out of place, like something that didn’t fit.
Like I’d slipped into some other reality.
I tiptoed out of the guesthouse to shiver gladly in the cold, darting across the courtyard and into the house. I’d gone to find some water at Emmanuelle’s beloved cocktail bar, or so I told myself—in reality, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had to keep moving, to stay limber and not be caught.
The bar was in disarray, as I could have predicted.
I’d already come to observe that Emmanuelle’s patterns required the presence of daytime staff.
Still, there was a sink. I picked up the cleanest- looking glass in sight and filled it, draining it all at once.
Then I filled it again, sipping more slowly, looking around at the aftermath of Emmanuelle’s latest fete.
Most immediate were the things I recognized, familiar items strewn across the sofa: one of Emmanuelle’s swirling caftans beside a slinky cocktail dress, an overturned pair of stiletto heels, a lacy thong in candy-apple red.
An image filled my mind, an arthouse scene, slick bodies pressed together, flush with hunger.
Mindlessly, I touched the ghost of Jude’s fingers where they’d rested on the column of my throat.
I’d never looked around this level of the house much.
Because it was where all the parties were held, I hadn’t thought there was any more to it aside from the mezzanine of sunken sofas and glass walls, a kind of reverse fishbowl.
I realized now, though, that there were doors; additional bedrooms to disappear into, I guessed.
The artful work of the truly hedonistic.
One was ajar and I pushed it ever so slightly open, catching one recognizable body tossed carelessly over the long, slender calf of a woman who’d walked runways all her youth. If nothing else, I’d found Emmanuelle.
I inched away quietly, continuing down the hall that was concealed behind the fireplace, the sunken living room.
There were multiple doors, all of them shut.
I smelled something sodden and earthy, like a mildewed swimming pool.
Vaguely, I thought: If I get caught, I’ll just say I was looking for the bathroom.
I tried a handle: locked. Which was best, considering that I already knew where to find several bathrooms, and even good acting didn’t supersede logical thought.
Outside the air was refreshingly frigid, the rain now resolved to a haze that was more annoying than anything else.
I paused at the edge of the courtyard to remember something I often forgot: that Los Angeles was beautiful.
That the foliage was rich and dense and the hills were rolling and eternal, and that from certain places you could still catch a glimpse of the stars.
That the distant smell of the ocean—the reminder of something vast—was prayerful to live beside.
In the pitch of midnight black, I could almost imagine it to extend forever, without beginning or end.
I thought of the devil, perched on my shoulder. The flutter of curtains from Jude’s open window. The look on his face when I gave him my hand, talking him down from the roof.
I turned around to take it all in, realizing that I hadn’t noticed before how deep the second level of the house must have gone. The bedrooms I’d passed, the one where Emmanuelle was sleeping, must have been built into the side of the cliff, nestled in its organs.
It was then that I heard voices coming from higher up on the path, somewhere alongside the house. Near the greenhouse, I thought, training my ears on the sound.
“—manifest soon,” someone was saying as I crept my way up the path. “We’ve done everything exactly to the letter. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work.” It was a low, masculine voice, though not one I recognized. “The hematology should have been perfect.”
“I’m telling you, it’s her.” That voice was a woman, cool and calm, with a familiar undertone of suggestion. Emmanuelle? No, I’d just seen her passed out in bed. “She’s lying to you, William. She has no loyalty to you or anyone, and no intention to perform the ritual properly, she never has—”
“Could the issue be Hodel?” The man was ignoring the woman, which gave nothing away. “You said he’d been having second thoughts. I told you, if he’s intentionally misleading us—”
“Yes, Fred”—ah, so it was Fred, William’s business partner—“you’ve made your suspicions plenty clear, you don’t need to tell me again.” And that was William de Witt, definitely. He was smoking, by the sounds of it. “It gets very tedious, you know, all this telling me everything all the time.”
The woman made cooing sounds, indecipherably rushed demurrals, but Fred remained adamant, borderline bullying. “I know he’s an old friend, Will, but the guy’s fucking ancient, and he was never truly yours. You told me yourself that Killian always said—”
“Do you have concerns for my memory? I know what Killian always said.”
There was a pause—a glacial, dangerous silence.
“Listen to me, William, it’s her. Once a liar, always a liar.” The female voice had cut in again, sing-song and insistent, seemingly an attempt to ease the tension. I was growing increasingly certain from her tone that it was Genesis.
“You both tread dangerously close to testing my patience.” I heard a swift exhale, a fresh puff of smoke. “And as for you,” he added to someone, “I don’t recall any of this being pertinent to the details of your role.”
The woman, apparently the target of William’s condescension, was audibly stung by this. “I am devoted to you. You know that. I only worry about—”
“She’s not wrong, Will—you’re completely saddled with dead weight.
” Now the other man sounded restless; the immediate danger may have passed, but not forever.
I knew these kinds of unspoken tactics from my dealings with my mother.
“You can have another—literally any other woman, any number of which would be easier to please, not to mention astronomically cheaper.”
William said nothing—which seemed to embolden Fred. “I’m not going to foot the bill forever, you know,” Fred murmured in a low voice. “Business school 101, Will—it’s a bad investment if there’s no fucking return. And if all of this turns out not to work—”
“I was under the impression you were enjoying the fruits of your labors when it came to the ritual,” William commented mildly. “Or was the last one not of your choosing…?”
A brittle pause. “Fine. She was a mistake. I freely admit that. I was careless and she saw more than she was meant to see. But—”
“Your investment would hardly be necessary if not for your own errors in judgment. You know what they say, Fred—don’t shit where you eat. And don’t stick your dick in it, either.”
“I expected her to have more discretion. And anyway, the blood—”
“Failed.” That was clipped, final. “Again.”
“Fine.” Another disgruntled pause. “But on the subject of where you eat, I don’t like that new girl being around.
” Fred’s voice then was annoyed, almost whiny.
The intonation of a man losing an argument he’d come here to win.
“I don’t know why you allow it. There’s no such thing as an actress who keeps her nose where it belongs. ”
I realized who the conversation had shifted to and froze.
To my relief, or possibly dismay, though, William was laughing.
“Have you spoken to her at all?” William chuckled.
There was a rattle in his throat, the sound of a wet cough.
Time to quit smoking, I thought. “It’s not bad.
That little coquette thing she does, it might be worrisome if it wasn’t so blatantly Method.
She’ll be the perfect Emmanuelle because she’s so fucking dead inside.
” A pause, the flick of a lighter. “You can practically see the mechanisms churning beneath her skin.”
I reeled back half a step, my heart pounding, as the woman’s voice—definitely Genesis, then—gave a mocking, sycophantic laugh.
Fred, however, sounded unconvinced. “You can’t afford another Emmanuelle,” he muttered. “And I’m just saying, fuck her or don’t fuck her, I don’t care, just make sure she’s—”
“The actress? She’s already fucking that little bitch Atticus made me hire.
” I heard a long, luxurious exhale from William then, like he was blowing a smoke ring, playing the role of king cavalier.
It seemed like I’d walked into a film set, some moody-toned Western.
“She’s harmless. Irrelevant to anything.
” He took a long drag, then said, “Blood’s not right, either. ”
“Then what’s the point of her?”
I heard an odd metallic clang, like a shovel hitting stone, that came from somewhere above me.