CHAPTER 3 #2
The stair was the worst of it, and I hadn’t expected the stair to be the worst of it.
The direction of down came apart on me. My head hung lower than my hip, the wall came and went on the same side twice, and my palm dragged along the gritty non-slip paint on the nose of the treads until it took the skin off.
Somewhere below us a loose handrail bracket knocked in its socket every time a body leaned on the rail.
I followed the flights by that sound until the sound and the flights came apart from each other.
The garage under the tower smelled of brake dust and the sweet chemical smell of the sealant they put on the floors, and underneath both of those, wet concrete.
Rian set me on my feet beside a gray panel van with its side door already open.
I stood up straight, because standing up straight was available to me.
A man was waiting on the ramp with his hands at his sides.
He was lean and bloodless and his head was shaved, and his eyes had almost no color in them at all.
“Whoever pays you is also paying my employer,” I said. “I’d like to have his name.”
His eyes went past me. He looked at Luca, and when he spoke he spoke softly, and there was Germany somewhere back behind the vowels.
“All four of you on a Friday. I will call this an inconvenience and not a fight.”
Then he turned and walked up the ramp at the pace of a man leaving a building he has finished with, and nobody went after him. He had looked at the four of them and made a decision that was entirely his to make, early and without any visible effort. That is the thing I carried into the van with me.
The van moved at twenty to nine. Somebody reached across and fastened my seat belt, which I intend to be angry about for a long time.
I wasn’t cuffed. Nothing went over my head, and I sat and watched the ramp and then the street and then the bridge lights go past a window like a woman on her way to an airport.
“I’m going to do this in order,” I said. “Order is the only thing in this van that still belongs to me.” Nobody stopped me, so I kept going. “Kidnapping in the first degree is a class A-one felony in this state, and every single one of you is inside it.”
“She’s doing them in statutory order,” Luca said. “I want it on the record that I find that beautiful.”
“Unlawful imprisonment, coercion in the first, burglary in the second, and criminal mischief for the door controls.”
“The door controls were mine,” Matteo said. “Put my name on that one and leave the others alone.”
“I’m putting all four names on all of them,” I said. “I’m going to spell every one of them correctly.”
“You missed the plates,” Rian said. “Those plates belong to somebody else.”
“Thank you for that,” I said. “Criminal possession of a forged instrument, and I’ll check the degree.”
The rain came on at nine o’clock and it came on all at once. It went over the roof of the van in one long shove of sound and then settled into something steady and enormous. Nobody put the radio on. I listened to it until listening to it stopped helping.
“I’m going to say all of this again to a grand jury, so correct me now if I’ve left anything out.”
“You’ve left out about half of it, and you know exactly which half, which is why you said correct me instead of asking me outright,” Luca said. “I’m not helping with the other half.”
“Wesley Pike drowned off Sheepshead Bay,” I said. “My firm sent a card to his widow.” The van took a corner and the whole row of us leaned. “Now four men have taken me out of the office I inherited from him. Would any of you like to tell me that those two facts are unrelated?”
“None of us would like to tell you that,” Luca said.
“I don’t know that one,” Matteo said. “I’m not going to invent one to have it.”
Rian looked out of his window at the wet street and let it go past him. When he spoke it was to the middle distance rather than to me.
“That letter on your desk is the only reason any of us knows your name.”
We went into a tunnel and the rain stopped hitting the roof, and the quiet was so sudden that I heard my own pulse take it over.
Cassian hadn’t said one word since the garage.
He drove the way he had stood in my office, which is to say he settled into it and then did not move about inside it, and he didn’t turn his head now.
“You asked a question about Wesley Pike,” he said. “You will get the full answer, and you will get it from me.”
“Then give me the first sentence of it now.”
“Write all of it down when we get there. I will sign whatever you put in front of me.”
“A signature on a document like that is not a favor to me.”
“I know what it is,” he said. “Write it anyway, and do not soften any of it on my account.”
Aerie House had a garage two levels under the street, and a wire gate that came up on a dry ratcheting motor, and cold rubber and standing water in the air instead of brake dust. We were inside it at two past nine.
My cheekbone had begun to swell against the inside of my own face, and when I put my tongue to the split in my lip the coins were still there.
The service car took a key to open it and Matteo had the key in his hand before the van doors were shut. The panel inside had almost nothing on it. Luca reached past me and pressed the button marked 71, and the doors came together, and the floor of the box pushed up under my feet.
The numbers began to climb and they kept climbing.
They went past the floors where a building like that keeps its offices and the floors where it keeps its people, and they didn’t stop.
Nobody covered my eyes. Nobody had covered them at any point in the whole evening, in a lit garage, in a lit van, in front of a stranger on a ramp who saw my face and will remember it, and I stood in that rising box and understood that this had been decided in advance by somebody, and written down, and agreed.
“You didn’t blindfold me,” I said.
“That was settled before we came into your building,” he said. “It is not going to change.”
“Then you wanted me to see the van,” I said. “And the garage, and the inside of this box.”
“I want you to know exactly where you are,” he said. “You are going to be here a while.”
“There is one door into this place and it does not open from your side, and I am telling you now so you never have to find that out alone.”