Chapter Twenty-One
Simon can hear that Nomi has finished puking in the bathroom, and she’s now running the faucet to rinse her mouth and wash her face.
He picked the teeth up off the floor and returned them to the small box. They sit innocuously, malevolently, in the middle of the coffee table between Nomi’s bag of cutting paraphernalia and her gun, making quite a grim tableau.
Leaning forward on the lounge chair, forearms on his knees, he looks up as Nomi returns to the living room, holding her stomach. “Are you all right?”
“What do you think?” Her eyes are red rimmed—from crying, or throwing up, or a combination of both—and her hair at the front is stringy with damp.
He thinks his continued presence in her apartment is only a matter of expedience, so he’s going to ignore her tone and stick to professional observations.
“I can’t tell if the teeth were pulled or fell out by themselves, but the blood on the root ends is very fresh—they were probably, uh, gathered in the last few hours.
” He’s not sure how he knows this. Normally he’d attribute it to working at Gennaro’s, but now he’s wondering if the knowledge was already there, part of an uncomfortably innate bundle of skills related to his history of homicide.
Although looking at the teeth makes him feel a weird mix of guilt and anger and sadness: Is a sociopath with a total lack of empathy supposed to feel such things?
“This happened because of me, didn’t it?
If Lamonte’s pulling out Brittany’s teeth, it’s because of what I did to Ameche at Big Mouth. ”
“Probably, yes.” Nomi seems to have decided she’s not here to make him feel better about himself. Then she sighs, shakes her head. “But they were delivered to me, so it’s a double whammy—makes me stop kicking over rocks, makes you feel like shit.”
“I do feel like shit.”
“Good.” But she can’t quite meet his eyes like she means it. She collects the small box with its horrifying surprise, transfers it to her refrigerator. Trudges past the sofa, around the folding screen, to the dresser near her unmade bed. “Look, I need to go, so you need to leave.”
He squints at her over his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Well, Simon, let me think—first, I have to go see Solange Jackson and tell her that I have her daughter’s teeth.
” She yanks open a drawer, drags her current black T-shirt up and off, stands in her black bra as she hunts for and pulls on another identical black T-shirt.
She said she has scars from her strange cutting activities; they’re not visible on her back—maybe she can’t reach there?
—but the huge ravens on her shoulder are an angry flurry of inky feathers.
“Second, I have to explain to Solange that it’s time to go to the cops, because this is . . . This is out of my league.”
Simon stands. “You’re giving up.”
“Yes, I’m giving up!” When Nomi turns, she’s glowering.
She grabs a black sweater off her bed and stalks back, pulling on the sweater, tugging her hair out of the collar.
“Gaffney was right—I’m fumbling around here, doing this investigation on my own .
. . and I’m fucking it up. I’d rather chew off my own arm than pass this kid’s welfare over to the cops, especially a slimeball like Balter, but all I’m going to do is get Brittany killed. ”
“But you said Solange might lose Brittany to social services if you—”
“Better she stays alive and goes in the system than gets dead and goes nowhere.” Nomi shoves her arms into the sleeves of her leather jacket.
“And now we have evidence she’s in immediate danger, maybe Balter and the Tenth crew will get off their asses and actually do something .
. . I mean, I can dream. Okay, get out, I have to go. ”
“I want my file.” Simon’s aware he’s pressing his luck, but it’s his file.
Nomi doesn’t seem to care as she finds her scarf, collects her shit. “Everything’s on my desk, as you’re no doubt aware. Just take it. Here—” She pulls her beanie and some random junk out of the tote on the sofa, thrusts it at him. “Put it all in here. This is all my library research notes too.”
He takes the tote and goes into her office, gathers up the gray document wallet, the brown envelope it came in, shoves it in with a seemingly random collection of paper notes.
There’s also his pile of stuff—notebooks, cigar box, identification papers—and another file folder marked with his name on top of a pile of newspapers.
He gathers everything, slides it in with the rest.
When he emerges back into the living room, Nomi’s chugging a glass of water in the kitchen. She dumps the empty glass in the sink and looks around, preparing to lock the place back up. “Okay, come on, time to go.”
Simon holds up the now-almost-overflowing tote. Everything is in here: his backstory, his past, the man he was. Part of him can’t believe he was so eager to find all this out. “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why you’re thanking me, but sure.
” Nomi tugs her beanie on, walks ahead down the hallway for the door.
Once they’re both out in the gloomy corridor, she pulls the door closed, uses her key.
At the point where they’re about to separate—Simon for the upstairs, Nomi going down—she turns and looks at him. “Simon . . .”
“Yeah?” For a second, he feels a stuttering flame of hope.
“Break into my apartment again, and I’ll shoot you and say it was a home invasion. Are we clear?”
His jaw clenches as hope is extinguished. “Crystal.”
“Good.”
She turns around and leaves. Simon feels like a fool standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching her go. But for some reason, pivoting on his heel and climbing to the third floor takes all his energy.
It’s nearly eight in the evening. He lets himself into his apartment.
It’s freezing, which isn’t customary, and he realizes he left the window near his bed wide open—he walks over and closes it, before going to the breakfast table and dumping the tote.
The apartment feels quiet and empty, which is stupid because it’s a studio apartment and he’s the only occupant, so it’s always quiet and empty.
It’s taking a while for the air to warm, so he tidies a little, very aware that putting the small details of his life in order when all the big details are a fucking mess is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
His head is aching; he takes another Vicodin, can’t help flashing on Nomi’s steely question: Why do you take Vicodin?
The memory of her wielding the tiny, glassy blade in the darkened living room of her apartment produces a complex swirl of emotions.
But now his fingers are cold, and he needs something warm.
He can’t handle more coffee, though; he’s already drunk about a dozen coffees today.
Instead, with a pang of homesickness, he makes ponche navideno out of raisins and fruit and cinnamon sugar and the rest of the merlot.
As the mulled wine mix simmers, he returns to the table and unloads the tote, setting everything to one side.
Pouring himself a glass of ponche, he collects the glass ashtray, sits down at the table, lights a cigarette. Then—with a visceral reluctance bordering on nausea—he begins going through all the paperwork.
The orange cigar box and his journals are something he can just put on the floor immediately, because what use are they now?
He focuses on the file pages, Nomi’s notes from the library, and a series of news articles that she’s photocopied and included.
There are pictures of crime scenes. Transcribed witness statements.
A comprehensive psychological review. The names and lives of the people he killed.
After a while, it starts to feel academic, and he has to keep reminding himself that it’s real.
He realizes there’s a schism in his awareness, which the language of the reports contributes to, which allows him to think, “Gutmunsson did this, and also this”—and then, with a sudden, piercing jolt, he remembers that Gutmunsson is not a separate person.
This isn’t some doppelg?nger: He is Gutmunsson.
Gutmunsson is him.
By his second glass of ponche and his third cigarette, Simon pushes the papers away.
As Gutmunsson, he killed people for pleasure.
He killed creatively, often posing his victims for display in some sadistic fantasy.
How can he live with this? In a just society, he’d be put to death, and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
He should be absent from the world—it might be safer for himself and for everyone around him.
Maybe he should go back to Guatemala. But the idea of exposing friends and neighbors in Piedras Negras to what he is . . . Explaining it to Flores . . .
How can he do that?
When the cognitive dissonance gets too loud, and his headache turns into a pain like a grinding of bone, and the big box of Vicodin in his bathroom cabinet—enough to just blank everything out and fall asleep forever—becomes too tempting, Simon grabs his coat and leaves the apartment again.
He needs to go somewhere, only he’s not sure where to go.
Somewhere he’s not surrounded by people, who die much too easily, their blood spilling all over the report pages like claret.
Somewhere nobody will expect him to talk and pretend to be human, because he’s obviously too good at that already.
He needs a place where he can sit in the dark and lick his wounds, and maybe—maybe—come to some kind of resolution about what to do with himself.
He ends up walking to the Bleecker Street Cinema.
The girl in the booth sells him a ticket for the show that’s just about to start; to Simon’s surprise, the film is called Hellraiser. So now it seems as if he’s finally going to find out what a hellraiser is.
It turns out that a hellraiser is an interdimensional sadomasochistic murderer, and the film is just one gory scene of brutal dismemberment after another.
After thirty minutes, Simon stumbles out through the theater doors followed by a chorus of screams and clanging black chains. A kid running a carpet sweeper up and down a patch of spilled popcorn in the hall notices him and grins.
“Bit too much for ya?” The kid pauses, rests the sweeper handle against the wall as he digs a pack of gum out of the pocket of his usher’s waistcoat.
He peels the paper off a stick and pops it into his mouth, starts chewing.
“Yeah, we get a couple people every session who come out looking green. You wanna go to the other movie?”
“I can’t afford to buy another ticket,” Simon admits.
“Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s gonna care. I’m the one who’s supposed to be checking tickets, and I couldn’t give a shit.” The kid pops his gum, lifts his chin at the next door down the hall. “There’s some old musical on in there. Sounds like it might be more your speed.”
Singin’ in the Rain has already been going for a while, but it doesn’t matter, because Simon has already seen it.
He sits in the dark in the almost-empty theater, watches Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor dance their way through life as if being happy isn’t the saddest, most out-of-reach dream that humanity has ever been sold.
By the time Simon gets back to his apartment at eleven, his mood is bleak.
He has work in four hours. Should he quit at Gennaro’s?
Will carving up meat—the smell, the blood, that smooth, satisfying texture under his knife—trigger a resurgence of all his old predilections for carving up people?
Simon splashes water on his face in the bathroom, leans over the basin and wonders how he’s ever going to reconcile any of this.
He wipes his face on a towel, walks back out to the breakfast table. At least he can pack up all the horror pages so he doesn’t have to look at them.
Under the file from Nomi’s office marked with his name, Simon discovers a half dozen copies of The New York Times, and he assumes they’re part of Nomi’s research materials until he knocks one off the stack—as it spills forward, he sees the headline below the fold, which reads Former Senator To Helm Commission.
Beside the headline, a black-and-white picture of a stern-looking older blond woman wearing a jacket with big shoulder pads.
Simon remembers opening the post office box in the Farley building with the small silver key.
He thinks of Max the Security Guy saying, Ricki was not as stupid as Sully makes him out to be, you understand?
He remembers Nomi’s suggestion that they check the society pages as well as the headlines about local and state government, so that’s what he does.
In the fourth copy of the Times, he finds something that makes him stand up from his chair.
Simon goes through all the newspapers to confirm, then packs them all into one portable pile, checks the time.
It’s close to midnight—will Nomi be home yet?
More relevantly, will she be willing to listen?
Maybe the thought of a seven-year-old girl’s teeth in her refrigerator will be sufficient encouragement.
He leaves his apartment. He’s trying hard—so very hard—not to think about the image of Nomi on her sofa, shirt rucked, head thrown back in abandon, a delicate runnel of blood leaking down her pale stomach into her jeans.
Halfway down the stairs, he sees her: newly arrived, key in her door, a lean black animal returning to her den.
Alert to movement, she snaps a look up and spots him.
She relaxes a tiny fraction. “I think I got something.”
“I definitely got something,” he says. “What’s your thing?”
“A list of Galetti’s properties, including the ones he wants rezoned. What’s your thing?”
He holds up the May edition of the society page of The New York Times, which has a group photo of the Axedale family at a gala benefit concert. “Jeremy is Gloria Axedale’s youngest son.”